Painting With Light
NEX-5N, 16mm E-Mount Lens, Manual Mode, 6.0 sec, ISO 100, f/6.3
Over the last 12 months I have read quite a lot about photography, and I have lost count of how many times people mention that the word ‘photography’ literally means ‘painting with light’, so I thought that I’d pass that little kernel of information on to anybody who reads this (in case you have not read it somewhere else quite yet). I have tried out a few different techniques this last week, with varying degrees of success, but I like how the featured shot turned out – simple but effective (in my opinion at least). I still have a couple of other ideas to try, but may not get the chance to do so just yet, so I have decided to stick with what I have and add my post.
I started off simply by writing in the air, using a torch. I used a long exposure, to capture the full trail of light that I made.
As I mentioned last week, I’m not really a very good artist, so I knew that I would find drawing things with a torch rather challenging. Although it was frustrating at times, it was also quite good fun, especially when you don’t have much else to do on a dark, cold evening! I took a few test shots in my hallway to begin with, and started off by writing the first thing that came in to my head, which was a small tribute to the people at Sony UK. The above image is actually 3 shots – I wrote ‘Sony’ in one, ‘U’ in the second, and ‘K’ in the third, having set my camera up on the tripod, turned it to Manual Mode and lowered the shutter speed right the way down to BULB Mode. I then took my old Maglite torch (the brand is important, as you’ll see in a bit), released the camera’s shutter using my remote control, and traced ‘Sony’ in the air, trying my best to keep the torch light facing straight at the camera. I had to end the shot as soon as I had finished writing, so as not to get any extra lines of light in the picture, using the remote control (which seems to be working properly again after its failure on me in Blackpool). I used three photos to avoid having to join ‘Sony’ up to the ‘U’ and the ‘K’, and then put them together using Photoshop Elements 10. This also allowed me to add different colours to the three different shots, but I left UK the same colour – the Maglite’s bulb gives off a white light in reality, as you can see in the next shot I attempted:
I had grand ideas for drawing a whole family scene, but spared my blushes by leaving it at this!
Whilst researching ideas for what sort of images to take this week, I came across my inspiration for attempting to draw a figure (it actually turned out better than I had expected, which tells you a lot probably!) – to see some seriously impressive light drawings, you should take a look at Michael Bosanko’s work, and also something similar (in terms of drawing people), which I came across a little later – rafoto. I think that I may have found the whole experience a little easier if I had been using a torch that switches on and off with the click of a button, rather than needing to turn the head which would result in extra light being added to the scene, and means every move you make is going to be captured. However, the Maglite’s twisty head is a blessing in another way, which is that it allows you to remove the head and expose the bulb – this gives a finer point of light, but lights the room like a candle in the process. I used this mode to have a go at creating my first light orb – I then took a shot of myself to add in and see how it might look with somebody behind it. Please remember that these were all test shots to see what sort of things I would be able to manage, so no thought went in to the location or other incidental details – I was using my fish-eye converter for the 16mm pancake lens, to see if that added anything to the overall effect:
Creating perfect orbs is not very easy – especially on your 1st attempt, using stiff wire instead of string to swing your light with!
I used the camera’s flash to take the photo of myself, and you can see the shadow cast by having the fish-eye converter attached. Which reminds me actually – this was the first time I have been able to use my new NEX-6 for anything other than taking photos of objects on my desk whilst playing with different settings! I decided not to use the fish-eye lens on my second attempts, but I did manage to get a shot of Yoda for a bit of variety – I edited it using CameraBag 2, which gives you loads of great artistic filters to add to your shots, and can be found on the Mac App Store.
Yoda wasn’t impressed with me swinging lights around, so he went upstairs until I turned the house lights back on.
The basic principle of creating an orb is that you need to start swinging a light in a circle, along a vertical plane, and then rotate through 180 degrees (not putting yourself between the light and the camera preferably!). However, you need to rotate around your own hand, which is easier said than done, if you want to create as perfect a sphere as possible. I did have another go with some different lights the following night, and was slightly more successful:
3 different orbs I captured, using red and white LEDs
You can see that I managed to rotate more closely around my hand, but you can also see that it is important to keep moving, or else you end up with uneven light trails. Having had a go at drawing in the air and creating a light orb, I decided to try out a technique I came across in the February edition of Digital Photo magazine, where you draw around objects using the candle mode of a small Maglite. It is best if you draw around different areas of your scene in separate shots, so that if you make a mistake it doesn’t ruin the whole image, and also so that you are able to add different colours to the various areas of the photo, using Photoshop. I drew around different areas of this fireplace and mirror, before combining them, but I did not alter the colours at this stage. It is probably a good idea to point out that you should NOT move your camera at all in between taking each shot, because otherwise your final images will not match up properly, and at best it will look as though you have a double exposure of the object you are painting with light.
I hadn’t been drinking, but my hand wasn’t very steady (maybe it would’ve been better if I had done so).
I decided to call it a night at this point, and return to the project the next evening after I had been able to look for new ideas and techniques to try out. It was one of these techniques which resulted in the featured image for this post, which involves you pointing your camera to the ceiling and dangling a light from a piece of string above it. As with most other light painting shots, you need to set long exposures to capture the movement of the light over a number of seconds. After failing to secure my torch with blu-tack and bending drawing pins that I attempted to push in to the ceiling, I decided to use the handle of a high up cupboard in my hallway to hang the string from, which turned out to be very helpful as it allowed me to alter the height of the lights during the exposure, for different effects. I used the Maglite to begin with, set it swinging and opened the camera’s shutter with the remote, before pulling the string to raise the torch, which meant that the circumference of its swing reduced the closer it got to the door handle. The affect that this had was to produce spiral shapes in the final images. I also secured the torch at a set height, made it swing and then pushed it in different directions during the course of the exposure. My shapes were not particularly good compared to some perfect geometric shapes I had seen on the internet, but here are a few examples which I have put together using Diptic (also available on the Mac and iOS App Stores):
5 Different attempts at swinging the torch from a string, above my camera.
Having played around with the Maglite for a while, I decided to use a couple of LED type lights – they are just small, cheap ones that you can buy to attach to a bicycle, but they flash quickly, slowly, or stay lit without flashing. This allowed me to obtain different effects, and I also combined the two lights together (on two strings), in a variety of ways which you can see the results of here:
A few examples of the different effects possible when using two LED lights and swinging them in different ways. I put them together using Diptic for Mac.
The featured image is a combination of both lights swinging in the same arc, together. I chose it because the spiral is nice and uniform, which means that I probably raised the lights at a steady pace. The LED lights I used have translucent bodies, which allowed light to escape and show the surrounding area of walls and ceiling, so I added heavy vignetting and also burned around the lights in Aperture 3 – you can probably still see a white line, which is the cupboard door, if you look closely enough.
Having run out of ideas for how to swing the lights any differently, I decided to return to painting around the fireplace, so took the head off the Maglite and set up my camera to take shots there. Unfortunately, after a few failed attempts, I managed to plant the seemingly delicate, exposed bulb straight in to the slate base of the fireplace. It didn’t smash or spark – simply turned off and wouldn’t come back to life. I eventually decided to use the white LED light, but it is very bright and gives a much thicker line of light – however, I finally managed to get three shots – one of the fireplace, one of the surround of the fire, and one of the central area of the fire (complete with some dodgy, fake flames!). I once again layered them together in Photoshop, and this time changed the hue of each shot. The LED is such a bright white though, that it is difficult to change the colour of the actual light trails, and the effect is applied more to the surrounding glow – I tried two different colour schemes, and ended up placing them together as mirror images, using Diptic to frame them into one image:
Not subtle or particularly pleasing to the eye, but hopefully you get the general idea of the technique that I was using.
There was one other technique that I was interested in trying out for this post, which is using sparklers to trace around objects (outdoors, unless you’re name is Mario Balotelli!), so as I woke up early this morning I decided to take a drive to take some photos of the snow, and also to try a quick shot of me running sparklers around the lines of my car – I bought some sparklers last week for this purpose, and they aren’t too easy to find at this time of year. I had to go to a local newsagents who seems to sell fireworks all year round, so I can’t really advise where the best place would be in general. Anyhow, I had set up my camera on the tripod, with a reasonable backdrop behind my car and the first light of day starting to appear, only to realise that I had left the remote control at home (after using it for various shots the previous nights). I could have maybe gotten away with setting the camera to a 30 second exposure and also delaying the shutter release for 10 seconds to give me time to get across the road to my car, but it was early and my brain wasn’t working quickly enough to think of doing that, so I set up to take some shots of the sunrise over a lake surrounded by snow-covered landscape. I will save them for another time, but I was happy with the last shot of the day – a reflection of the landscape in my car windows, which I altered heavily using the CameraBag 2 software that I have discovered recently. Here is the original and the final version:
A quick shot of the landscape’s reflection in my car window.
The same photo, but with an artistic filter applied, using CameraBag 2. I like it the contrast that it adds to the clouds in the black and white area.
Well, hopefully I have been able to give you a few ideas to try, but if you are interested in this type of photography then type ‘painting with light photos’ in to Google and there are loads of amazing hints, tips and ideas to try there.
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