Painting with light: Tutorial

devbobo · April 22, 2005

A few people said they were interested in the technique I used for my 'Painting with light' photo in Challenge 36.

What you will need...

- Torch, I used a small MagLite
- Paintbrush
- Roll of Aluminium foil

-Tripod mounted camera (of course)
- Wired remote (optional)

Firstly, you need to make a snoot out of aluminium foil to attach to the end of the MagLite, so that you are able to control of the direction and spread of the light. Mine looked something like this...

Note: I use some electrical tape, to stop light coming through the gap in the join.

To make my life a bit easier, I attached my wired remote to the paintbrush as below...

With my camera set to manual, F/8, 5 secs and focused to infinity.

I held the torch and the paintbrush together as shown below. Pressed the shutter button. Held the MagLite still for about 1 sec, and then moved it away from the paintbrush as shown.

I knew how I wanted the end result to look, but it took about 20-30 exposures until I got a result I was happy with.

The photo below is the one I decided I was happy with...

However, I felt the lines with too uniform, so I found another exposure and added it as an 'overlay' layer to the original. This produced a more random light stream as below...

I then used 'curves' to change the color of the light to purple, and did some other clean up work. To produce the final result...

If anyone has any questions, don't hesistate to ask.

Cheers,

David

gus · April 22, 2005

Very smart

well done.

Shay Stephens · April 22, 2005

Yes, that totally rocks. It looks great!

Humungus wrote:

Very smart well done.

Andy · April 23, 2005

ehughes · April 23, 2005

That's incredible, thanks for sharing the secret...

rahmonster · April 25, 2005

You know, I have been pondering for days how you made such a wonderful shot...Thanks for letting us in on the secret....Truly excellent

clap

PeterGar · April 26, 2005

Very nice... thank you!

wxwax · April 26, 2005

Love tutorials. Thanks for sharing your technique, David.

BTW, your shot's a perfect example of what you can do if you visualize what you want ahead of time. I think that effective visualization always leads to a better image.

devbobo · April 27, 2005

Thanks everyone for your fantastic comments.

I really enjoyed this challenge, as I like trying out different things photographically...and like some others here, I was surprised at how easy it was.

BTW, wxwax thanks for moving this tut into the halls of wisdom...i feel honored

David

Charlie Brown · October 6, 2005

thats an amazing technique that im so going to steal from you...seriously though man thats something i never would have thought of but will try to use in the future.

charlie