Light Painting

Lena and myself discovering the wonders of light painting.

I went to a light painting workshop about four years ago and had a blast. It involves setting up a camera on a tripod set to a long exposure. You then have to use a torch or preferred light source to draw in space. Your movements over time with the light are then captured by the camera and turned into an image.

An animation of a classmate, scott, electrocuting Iona. You can see the blur that is me in the background.

So at college, you can imagine I was excited to hear I would have the opportunity to experiment with long exposure light drawing once again. We have five weeks to develop our ideas like in the 3D rotation.

A 'failed' and 'successful' long exposure photograph. This depends on your oppinion, though.
This is art, of course!

So our class was divided into groups and our photography teacher, Richard, walked us through the settings needed to obtain a good light painting image. This required the camera in Manual mode so that we could change the shutter speed (1s-30s) and the Aperture (~F4.0) independently. The iso was at 100 and the lens was set to manual focus.
By fiddling around with these you can get different outcomes. In the above image, the top photo was out of focus and had too low an F number. You can see how much better the second image was after we rectified these issues.

So then we experimented, of course! The light in these images was from an iPhone torch shining through come coloured cellophane. The camera speed was set to about 7 seconds; enough time to walk quickly around your subject, wobbling a light about.
I really love the way these three photos turned out! The colour is vibrant and the long exposure gives a kinda creepy feeling to the images. A friend of mine said these look like an alien abduction, I like that!

I made an animation out of multiple photos of this pose with the line different in each of them. You can see that at the beginning of this blog post.
I am excited to see where how we can develop this technique further and will discuss those outcomes in the future.