Light Painting

Light painting, is one of the most exciting camera technics that uses the combination of exposure, shutter speed and a source of light. And with your DSLR, you will be able to create magical pictures. But first, in order to do something, you have to know how its done.

In all DSLRs there is this thing called shutter speed. It's actually the rate of your shutter closing and opening, which can be set to be auto or manual(bulb). This is the most important key in making a light painting. Second, is exposure, this will tell you have much light taken in the sensor, so if you’re taking picture in the dark and you don’t  want the natural light to be in the picture. Therefore, the exposure must be set right( I will tell you in later posts). In order to do a light painting you need the darkest room or open space (to take a wide angle picture) to make the picture. The light could simply be a touch light or a led light. For the first version we used a handphone flash light.

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    Now since you got all the material, lets start. The main thing in making a light painting pic is improvising. Once you know how to take pic, improvise. That will lead you to great pics. Now to take a pic, you need to:

1.       Set up your tripod and decide the angle. You must have a tripod so that you won’t have a shaky image at the end of the shoot.

2.       The turn camera to manual mode of shutter mode (if you have one). Then with a 1 sec shutter mode, take a blank pic. From the image you can see whether any natural light is taken in or not. If it does have natural light in it, then lower down your exposure until you get a black pic.

3.       Now you are ready to take a pic. Ask a friend to stand in the frame and just aim the right at him. Snap the image to get the frame that your friend is standing.

4.       Next, turn your camera on self-timer, this is because even a slight shake when you're doing the light painting will result in a bad image. Then, change you shutter speed to 8 sec or more.

5.       Now is the real deal, ask your friend to move the light in a direction as he like and snap the pic. Ask him to continue moving until the shutter closes.

6.       Now you will have a pic of moving random light

  Now your ready, explore this technique and enjoy, make sure you try out other moving light by applying these rules.

 Enjoy,

LETS BE AWESOME