Beginning Photography – Light Painting
ByI came across light painting while searching YouTube for tutorials on photography and flash. The concept is pretty simple, put your camera into open shutter or bulb mode. Then within the area of focus use whatever light source you wish such as a torch to light your subject. Because the shutter is open, the ambient light needs to be as dark as possible (pitch dark if you can). If you light a torch and move it around in front of the lens, the streaks are recorded as just that – streaks or strokes.
I decided to use my faithful guitar once again for this experiment. I put it on its stand and setup the camera on a tripod. I set the camera to bulb mode, and focussed on the guitar with the room lit. Another of my cheap Ebay purchases that I was keen to try was a cable shutter release (about $10). I plugged that into my camera PC port and that allowed me to open and close the shutter without ever having to touch the camera (although being in a dark room it didn’t matter so much). Then I got a small bicycle torch and taped some paper round it to better focus its light beam. Through trial and error it was continuously too bright so I diffused it a bit by taping tissue paper over it.
The bicycle light I used, I taped some card round it to focus its beam, then covered the opening with some tissue paper to soften or diffuse the light.
The setup, Camera set sideways on a portrait rig on the tripod. I composed and focussed the shot with the lights on, then turned them off before taking the actual shot.
Once I had everything setup, it was just a case of turning off all the lights, then fumbling my way to the guitar stand, placing the light at the start point near the bottom of the guitar and carefully tracing my way round the guitar body and fret board. I found that best results were achieved if I pointed the light in towards the guitar rather than pointing it directly at the camera. It took some trial and error to determine how fast I needed to move the light round the guitar body but after some practice I started to get some reasonable results. When I had traced round the guitar with the small bike lamp, I then got a bigger torch and shone it round the base and floor, a little behind the guitar and a little in front (again very much trial and error). Finally after reviewing many results I decided the shot needed something else so I put my flash unit behind the guitar facing it and trigged that remotely.
So to recap, while the shutter is open, trace round the body of the guitar with a small focussed light beam (bike torch), then shine a bigger torch down from above and light various parts of the guitar and the floor. Finally trigger a flash positioned behind the guitar – then close the shutter. All this is done in a pitch dark room so be careful. I will admit that at one stage I knocked the tripod over and my beloved camera went crashing to the ground. It seems to be ok but knowing my luck, some critical element inside the box will fail soon. I really could have done without that!
The results
I ended up taking about 20 shots before I finally settled on one. Some of the discards are beautifully lit but too chaotic or whatever. For example I love #1 below because of the way its lit, shame about the mess of trails. Only for that it would be winner. The one I finally settled for is #2.
#1 (Click to enlarge) 
#2 (Click to enlarge) 
This is the one that I posted on my flickr page. I love the way the floor came out and the flash was pretty subtle causing a sensation being spot lit from above as well as casting shadows outwards from the guitar stand legs.
