Painting With Light

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Painting With Light

(One of My Favourite Lighting Techniques)

    "Painting with Light" or "light painting" is one of my favourite techniques with regard to lighting a set-up. The term is exactly what it says. In a totally dark room or outdoors, you place your camera on a tripod, keep the shutter on "B" (Bulb),  and with a portable light source (flashlight or off-camera flash) you simply light up the tabletop set-up or an outdoor scene.

       There are several adjustments and precautions that you need to take in order to get nice results, and I'll explain them later. So here goes....

  The Tools

 A Windable Garrity Flashlight and Aluminum Foil

The Garrity is a windable flashlight. You turn a crank and that charges the flashlight.

I couldn't find my regular flashlight, so I substituted this one "in a jam".

The aluminum foil is placed around the flashlight head so you don't get any streaking form the flash light head. There are examples that you'll see below. Normally I use a special photo foil  called "Cinefoil"that is painted black heavy aluminum foil. 

Warning!

1. Make sure you know where everything is. You're working in total darkness, and don't want to injure yourself!

1. Pick a wider-open f-stop such as f 8 and set the camera to 

either a certain amount of time (30 seconds) or set it to "B".

The above was f 16, and as you can see my "educated guess" was way off in the exposure.

Another mistake of not having enough time

 2. Much Better Time!

I set the f-stop to f 8 and the shutter to 10" (seconds)

This was however not enough time!

2. Much Better Time!

I set the f-stop to f 8 and the shutter to 20" (seconds)

This was however not enough time!

3. Much Better!

f 8 with 30" of time

Notice the streaks! These are form my not having used aluminum foil to make a cone for the flash ;light head. This prevents the flash light head from being aimed at the camera as you "paint".

4. Using Aluminum Foil to shield the Flash Light Head

As you can see the exposure is off even though I used the same exposure as above.

This was however not enough time!

The reason for the underexposure is that the aluminum cone blocks out some light!

I used the above image (without the aluminum foil)

I've been very busy today, and wanted to get this instalment out.

However, as they say "haste makes waste"

5. Noise

My camera is a Canon T1i, buy any digital camera will do.

Notice that 3 pixels are red. This is another form of noise.

The CPU in the camera and the anti-noise software built into the camera still hasn't been perfected yet!

Noise (actually the noise is a red pixel)

The colour and detail can;t be captured on the Net

More Noise Magnified

Still More Noise Magnified

The Final Result

     I'm  going to do another post on "painting with light" because it's fun and it's a great skill to acquire. My final image above is not what I was intending, because the lighting is too flat. What I normally do is to distribute different quantities of light to different areas of the set-up. In this way, the different intensities create 3D which is lacking in photography (a 2D concept).

I have to stop now because I'm going to a friend's vernissage for her new presentation of her work.

Please return later on (4 hours) and I will have elaborated on this technique and gone into more detail.