Light Painting

Light pairing is one of my most favorite things about photography. There's just so much you can do with it, and it looks awesome! 

So tonight I obviously decided to do some light painting. I used my room as a subject. My roommate moved out a bit ago, so I have a whole dorm room to myself now, which is pretty awesome. As you can see, I've made the two twin beds into one king bed, and made a small cave underneath. There's so much more room now. 

I digress, this is photography not interior design. So how does one make a light painting like this?

Not in one exposure. I believe this is about 8 or 9 exposures composited together in Ps. Before I get to Ps, lets talk about how to actually do the painting in the first place.

To paint effectively with light, you need a bright flashlight or light source. You can do it with dim lights of course, and that's great if you just need to add a bit here and there, but for the effect you see above, you need something with power. I use a LED Maglite with 200 lumens, but anything over 100 or 150 should work fine. To color the light, I use the gels from my flashes. They're wide enough to fit over the bulb, and they obviously very colorful. If you don't know, a gel is just colored plastic, and any colored, transparent plastic will do. 

Once you have your light ready, you have to decide how long of a shutter you want. A longer shutter, say 30s, will give you the most time to light things, but it will also have the most ambient light influence. This means your colors won't be a bright or intense as if you used a shutter of say 8s. It's a trade off that you have to decide for yourself based on the situation. I usually do a few exposures at different shutter speeds and levels of brightness just so that I have the background untouched by artificial light. This way, I can have complete control over the intensity of the colors later is post processing. 

I didn't do that for this photo though. I didn't do it because I wanted to just go for it and see what it would turn out like. The fun about light painting is that it's all guess work. You get good at judging, but you never ever know exactly how its going to look. You have to chimp and check your work after every exposure if you want to get exactly what you're after. 

The setting I used for tonight were 8s, f2.2 and ISO100. My light is very bright, so I didn't need that high of an ISO to pick them up. Shutter speed doesn't really affect how bright the light you paint is. It's the same concepts from using a strobe. The shutter does almost nothing, it's the aperture and ISO that will effect how the colors are in relation to the rest of the image. Yes, the shutter does affect the brightness of the ambient, but the light you paint with is too erratic and changes so fast the shutter doesn't care about it. You are only exposing a part of the frame for part of the time the shutter is open, so it doesn't matter if the shutter is open for 5s or 30s if you're only painting for 1s. The color will get washed out more at 30s, but that's only because the ambient will burn in. For the most intense colors, use shorter exposure times, and if you want more ambient, take a photo of just ambient light to blend in later in Ps.

Speaking of Ps, how do you blend all those photos together? You can't mask around ever light because transitions are much to wide and you'd get hard lines everywhere that'd look oh so fake (although, that's something to play with in the future). The answer is blending modes. You do have to mask out the areas that you don't want from each frame, but you just use a big, soft brush. All the layers are set to "screen," which lets all the highlights and bright areas of the layers come together into one image. From that, you can adjust the brightness or fill of each layer independently, even duplicating a layer if you want a more intense effect. Playing with other blend modes can be very cool too. Color dodge and color burn change the image a lot. 

Once you're done in Ps, just export it straight out, or go back to Lr and add whatever you want. Clarity, tonal adjustments, whatever you want. 

Light painting is all about guessing and just doing random stuff until you come up with something cool. It's one of the more abstract, and dare I say creative, sides to photography. I encourage you to go play with it, I guaranty you'll have fun with it. Don't be afraid to try crazy things, you might come up with something cool.

See you tomorrow.