I recently read a pretty cool article around the idea of painting with light in photography. At first I wasn’t quite sure what that meant when I read the heading of the article but the jist of this is taking a photo with a long exposure in the dark and lighting up areas in your photo. What turns out is a photo of black but only ares where you lit the scene show up in the frame.

An idea someone did in the article was at night in a field of hay they set up their camera, and focused it upon a few bails of hay. With no light except for maybe some of the night sky they went around dressed in black with a flash light and lit up the bails and the final photo turned out with this creepy glowing bails and the rest of the photo some what dark

Here is an example of a photo taking from Chris Becker’s site. He has lots of more really cool light painted photos so be sure to head on over to his site to see more.

Another cool artist created an amazing looking photo its almost to true to be not touched by photoshop, check out some of his work at his site -Wadey James.

You can pretty much do your own experiments if you have a camera that can take long exposures. Simply find a very dark place maybe in your house set up your scene with the light on, and focus your camera on the objects you want to light up. Turn off the lights and start your exposure, then light up your objects/subjects and see how it turns out. It’s best to experiment with different types of lights, colored lights or anything that will light up a scene.

I haven’t found the time to dot his yet but some day when im not doing one of the other million projects I plan on giving it a shot.

Here are some additional links since I don’t have a link to the article that might spark an idea for you to try.

*Flashlights, Fog and Digicams at Night

*PAINTING WITH LIGHT

of course googling around for “light painting” or “painting with light” will bring up many more.

Happy light painting, and if you do any cool ones let me know about it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Photos and Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.