Tag Archives: light painting

17 Creative Photography Tutorials to Cure Boredom

Do you sometimes struggle to come up with creative photography ideas, and start to find photography a little bit boring?

You’re not alone. It’s often all too easy to forget what fun photography can be until you start look at the works of others for inspiration. Take these 17 creative photography tutorials for example, they all provide you with a different insight into how to create more interesting photos, for fun.

Night Photography

During the winter months, I used to find that I simply didn’t have time to take photos for fun during the day time anymore, which invariable left me turning to shooting outdoors at night. I didn’t really know what I was doing at first, but I soon learned, and started to love night photography.

You can learn all about night photography in this fantastic ebook: Seeing The Unseen – Landscapes at Night – $15

The Brenizer Method

Wedding photographer Ryan Brenizer invented this really cool technique while on his honeymoon which is dubbed “The Brenizer Method”. For those who may or may not have heard of it and are not sure of what this technique is exactly, it’s essentially using a telephoto lens to create a very shallow depth of field as if shot with a wider angle lens. This technique makes a dSLR image look like it was shot by medium format.

High Speed Photography

Freezing fast motion (AKA High Speed Photography), can give some pretty special photographic effects. High Speed Photography is used in physics, health research, sports and more. This guide describes how to capture super fast movements using ordinary camera gear and a little home made electronics.

Smoke Photography

Smoke photography can be used to create some awesome looking effects, using flashes, torches, natural light and more, all in a very small space. Once you’re done, you can edit the smoke to appear in a different colour, and merge two photos together to make it appear as if the smoke has come from somewhere it’s not.

Macro Photography

Close-up photography is great for really bringing out the detail of your subject. In this macro photography tutorial, they tell you how to get the best results when shooting macro outside.

HDR

This tutorial will attempt to demonstrate how to make a realistic HDR, one that is virtually indistinguishable from a single exposure. The biggest goal is producing a tutorial that can stand as a standard by which anyone can learn to create a balanced HDR. Ultimately, the processing choices are yours. These are the building blocks.

Also in ebook form: HDR Photography Essentials Pack – $29.

Panoramic Photos

Panoramas can produce some awe inspiring photos, providing the viewer with a much wider viewing angle than they would typically see, either from a photo, or their eyes. You can create small panoramas, merging just three photos, or go the full 360, and produce miniature globes like in this post here.

Milky Way

Learn how to take photos of The Milky Way from Jim Harmer over on Improve Photography. This is something I’ve always wanted to try, but living in the UK (which is much densely populated than the US), it’s hard to find a night sky which isn’t ruined by light polution.

Slow Sync Flash

Slow sync flash is when you fire your flash either at the beginning or end of an exposure that’s slower than normal, for example 1/8 of a second. Anyone with experience behind a camera knows that it’s very hard to hold the camera steady enough for a sharp exposure at this sort of speed, and that’s where the flash comes in. By firing the flash, you freeze the motion and collect light trails in the remaining time, creating this rather cool effect, like in the photos below.

Infrared Photography

Infrared, or “IR” photography, offers photographers of all abilities and budgets the opportunity to explore a new world – the world of the unseen. Why “unseen”? Because our eyes literally cannot see IR light, as it lies just beyond what is classified as the “visible” spectrum – that which human eyesight can detect. When we take photographs using infrared-equipped film or cameras, we are exposed to the world that can often look very different from that we are accustomed to seeing. Colors, textures, leaves and plants, human skin, and all other manner of objects can reflect IR light in unique and interesting ways, ones that cannot be mimicked with tools such as Photoshop.

This is also covered in the Trick Photography & Special Effects Ebook – $47.

Tilt Shift Processing

A true tilt-shift photo is done using a tilt-shift lens, and they’re typically used for architecture photography, to fix the perspective of buildings when you look up. Recently though, the effect has been used in photoshop to create ‘model village’ style photos, making the whole scene look miniature.

Colorize a B&W Photo

The process of turning a black and white photo into color can be tricky, depending on the photo you’re working with. Adding color is simple. The tricky bit is the selection process. Without any color, objects have a tendency to blend with each other. This tutorial is meant to demonstrate the process of adding color to a black and white photo.

Black & White Photography

Black and white is nothing new when it comes to art, it’s been going on since the beginning of time and art photography is similar in that it started out as black and white due to technical limitations, way before the dawn of colour film. Even though the majority of photography in done automatically on digital cameras, black and white photography still lives on today.

ND Filter Long Exposure

Neutral density (ND) filters reduce the amount of light entering the camera, enabling a longer exposure time than otherwise possible. This can emphasize motion, or make an otherwise tumultuous scene appear surreal and quiescent. Alternatively, an ND filter also enables larger apertures, which can produce a shallower depth of field, or achieve a sharper photo. Either way, this is a useful and often under-appreciated filter that deserves a deeper look.

Droste Effect

The Droste effect is an image effect named after a Dutch cocoa company called Droste. In 1904 it produced packaging for its cocoa product showing a woman carrying a tray with a box of cocoa and a cup on it. A small version of the package appeared on the cocoa box on the tray and so on – each version of the image being successively smaller than the last.

This can also be found here: Trick Photography & Special Effects Ebook – $47.

Light Painting

In short, it’s a fun, easy way of getting some really cool photos. You don’t need to spend hours looking for a cool location, light painting can be done just about anywhere, so just follow my step by step, insightful, thought process about taking great light painting photos and you’ll be well on your way.

Again, this is a chapter in: Trick Photography & Special Effects Ebook – $47.

Mini-Planet Polar Coordinates

To make a long story short: The “Polar Panorama Effect” is one of my favorite ways to process photos into unique pieces of art. It takes a panoramic (or landscape) photo and uses the Polar Coordinates filter of Photoshop CS or The Gimp to create a circular image that seems to wrap the panorama around a planet.

Guess what? You can also find it here: Trick Photography & Special Effects Ebook – $47.

Trick Photography and Special Effects eBook Photos

The photos below all come from Evan Sharboneau’s Trick Photography and Special Effects ebook. It’s currently available at a reduced price, for a limited time. I didn’t want to clutter my review with photos, so I thought I would include them all here instead.

You can read my full review here, or click on any of the links below to find more information and purchase the ebook.

The ebook shows you how to take all of the photos below, plus many more.

Trick Photography and Special Effects eBook Photos

High Speed Water Splash Photography

Infrared Photography

HDR Photography

Trick Hand/Face Photography

Floating Photography

Light Painting

High Speed Photography

Invisible Man Photography

Sparkler Light Painting

Steel Wool Light Painting

360X180 Panorama Photography

Multiplicity Clone Photography

Special Effect Photography

Laser Pen Light Painting

High Speed Splash Photography

Levitation Photography

30 Day Photography Challenge Project

This is my brand new 30 day photography challenge, and I want YOU to take part too. For my next 30 posts, I’m going to be providing you with tips on how to take the photos that I’ve listed here, and sharing my own results (and I encourage you to share yours too).

Starting today, I will be posting 5 posts a week on here, as well as over on my Facebook page, Twitter and Pinterest.

As I complete the project, I will be posting links to the different photos and tips as I complete them, and the days below will turn from black to blue (links). Follow through the links for tips on how to take part yourself.

Take Part

If you want to take part yourself, then just come over to my Facebook page, Twitter and/or Pinterest, and share your photos with me and the rest of the community. The best photos will be added to the posts, and shared with tens of thousands of people.

That’s all you need to know really, hope you enjoy these different ideas; they will certainly help you to improve your photography.

The Challenge

Day 1: Self Portrait - Complete! – Your photos added.

Day 2: Rule of Thirds - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 3: Black & White - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 4: Texture - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 5: High Angle – Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 6: Low Angle - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 7: Silhouette - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 8: Sunset - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 9: Bokeh - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 10: Lens Flare – Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 11: Landscape - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 12: Portrait - Complete!

Day 13: Dynamic Tension - Complete!

Day 14: Light Painting - Complete!

Day 15: Colorful Water Drops - Complete!

Day 16: Balanced - Complete!

Day 17: Unbalanced - Complete!

Day 18: Frame within a Frame - Complete!

Day 19: Panorama - Complete!

Day 20: Depth - Complete!

Day 21: Water Splash - Complete!

Day 22: Slow Sync Flash - Complete!

Day 23: Panning - Complete!

Day 24: Harris Shutter - Complete!

Day 25: Shallow DoF - Complete!

Day 26: Light Graffiti - Complete!

Day 27: Street Photography - Complete!

Day 28: Architecture

Day 29: Night - Complete!

Day 30: Hidden Camera Mirror Photo - Complete!

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10 Creative Photography Project Ideas

As we draw closer to the end of 2011, the standard practice of coming up with a new year’s resolution comes into play, and for all of us, there’s always room to improve our photography. This year, I attempted a couple photography projects, and as I took more and more photos, I found that they were getting better and better. The best way to learn, is to practice, and what better way than with a fun, creative, photography project.

365

This is a fairly common project idea, and one that I’ve attempted myself in the past, but I must say, it’s much harder than it seems. I actually only made it about three months in before I stopped. The idea is that you take a photo every day, and you submit it to a website, or even just your personal archive, so that by the end of the year, you have something to look back on, and see how much you’ve improved, as well as a record for your year.

Think about the last time you used your camera, when was that? The last time you lugged around a big, heavy camera, and took loks of photos? For some of us, that may be yesterday, but there will be plenty of people for whom it was weeks ago. Think how much your photography would improve if you took photos every day. That’s the basic premise of this project, and I must say, it really does work. I would find that I would dedicate time every day to finding something new to take a photo of, and try to make it interesting. When I had a great idea, or found something really interesting, then the results were great, but I found that I was so busy with other things going on, that a lot of the photos I was taking weren’t that interesting. If you have the stamina to go the whole year, then this is definitely the project for you.

52 Weeks

As you can probably guess, this project borrows a lot of ideas from the 365 project, only instead of coming up with something every day, you come up with something every week. The main difference is that you can add a theme to each week, whether you want to just take photos of a particular object, or photos taken in a certain place, or on a different photowalk each week. Photowalks are great for finding inspiration with photography, because you explore new places, actively thinking about how you can take photos of certain objects, and this leads to some really interesting photos, which you wouldn’t have seen before.

Photowalks don’t have to be specific walks that you’re going on for the purpose of taking photos, they can just be times when you’re out of the house, with your camera. I take my camera most places when I’m out walking these days, because you never know when you’re going to see something worth capturing. If you don’t want the pressure of taking a photo every day, or you simply don’t have the time, then this is a great way to explore your photography skills, and track your progress.

A-Z

This is a project that I’m planning for next year, and it’s where you take photos of images that represent the letters of the alphabet, which can be done in three different ways.

Letter: Firstly, you can simply capture images of letters that you see about, which will open your eyes up the world around you, and encourage you see in a more photographic way.
Object: Instead of seeing a physical letter on a sign, you can look for objects that represent the same shape as the letter that you’re trying to capture, such as an s-shape in a river. This is slightly more difficult, but it will have more positive effects as you you’re forced to look a little bit deeper into what you see around you.
Action: Rather than looking for a physical letter, look for an action, which represents a letter. This sounds easier than the other two, because all you have to do is think of 26 actions, but it’s really not. You have to not only find these naturally occurring actions, but you they need to be easily recognised by anyone looking at the image too.

If you’re looking to start an A-Z project, I would suggest the object one first, perhaps once a week for the first half of the year, and then the action one second. That way, by the end of the year, you have a images to match up to each other, and a point of comparison for each. The same project can also be done with numbers.

Self Portraits

This is in a similar vain to 365, where you take photo everyday, only with this project, the subject is already decided upon; yourself. Self portraits sound really easy, but they’re not at all, because once you’ve taken a more than about 10, it becomes a lot harder to come up with original ideas. You could simply use your computer to document yourself everyday for the next year, but it’s much more interesting when you try to break free from your computer, and come up with something different.

Not only will this project document your photography, but yourself as a person too, and the beauty of having yourself as a subject, is that you never have to look for a model. The photos will start to depict your mood, along with the various events that are happening in the world at the time. It’s like a personal journal, that you don’t have to share with people if you don’t want to, but it will continue to help your photography evolve as you’re forced to think of new ideas for the same subject.

Not actually me!

The Nifty 50 Challenge

As anyone who’s spent any real time on this website will know, I love to recommend that 50mm f/1.8 to people, because it’s a great upgrade for the price. The nifty 50 challenge takes this lens, and really helps you to get the most out of it. The basic idea is that you take a photo with a 50mm lens every day, for 50 days. Then by the end of it, you will have created some beautiful shots that focus around you making the most out of what you’ve got. People are always making excuses for why they can’t get a certain type of photo, and it usually comes down to the gear they’re using, but when you get rid of this excuse, and just focus on taking great photos, you’ll find that the photos will come out a lot better than you expected.

Your knowledge of depth of field and aperture will also greatly improve because the results are much more extreme at the widest apertures, so if there was anything that you weren’t so sure about, you’ll soon know all about with this project. This is an exercise in your skills and your imagination as a photographer.

Shoot from the Hip

Shooting from the hip with your camera is similar to shooting from the hip with a gun; its incredibly inaccurate. I always think that I know what I’m going to capture when I take a photo from the hip, but it’s only on a very rare occasion that I actually capture what I think I will. This gives a new, fresh perspective on your composition, and creates shots by accident, that you may not have thought to take on purpose. By taking away the viewfinder, you have to use your instincts to capture a photo, and this can be very refreshing.

The trouble with learning even very basic composition techniques is that you start to think of these techniques as rules, and not just guidelines. When you take your eyes out the equation, you can start to see how different results can work just as easily, and without even realising it, you will be implementing composition techniques that you’ve not even learned about yet. The new, lower angle can work really well, even if you want to see what you’re doing; try using live view to compose the shot if you’re struggling to end up with the result that you’re looking for.

Camera Phone

Carrying your camera everywhere can become a bit of a drag, and often the quality of the photo doesn’t have to mean the quality of the camera you’re using, it can rely on the actual image. If there’s something we all carry with us everyday, it’s our phones, and with the cameras in them improving every year, what better way to start capturing photos. Using your phone allows you to put exposure on the back burner, and lets you focus more on composition instead.

The reason I recommend this project is because understanding composition is the most important factors to taking great photos, and by just using your camera phone everyday, and thinking about what you have to do to take a great photo, is going to dramatically improve your photography. One thing I would recommend that you don’t do is start to use photography apps that mostly just add effects and filters to photos. This is not improving your photography, it’s merely lulling yourself into a false sense of pride over a photo, which you didn’t do by yourself.

Light Painting

Light painting is opening your camera’s shutter up for a long enough time so that you can draw in the darkness with a light source such as a torch or a lantern and effectively paint inside a photo. This is very similar to light graffiti, which is much the same, the difference being that you’re using the light source as the subject to create some cool shapes in the air, rather then using it to paint light onto a dark scene. It’s actually a lot of fun to try, and you could even involve this project with other projects, such as the A-Z.

The reason I got into light painting was because I found that I was so busy all the time, the only time that I was available to take photos, was at night. This meant that I did a lot of night photography, which naturally led on to light painting. This is a great idea for a project because it takes such a long time to master, you can document your improvements as time passes.

Black & White

The beauty of black and white photography is that it focuses on visual elements such as tone, texture and shape. By starting this project for yourself, you’ll start to see things in a different light, and rather than just colour, your eyes will be better trained to recognise different shapes and forms.

A Single Theme

Shooting with a single theme is a great way to start to broaden the objects that you shoot. You simply take a certain theme, such as a colour, an object, or even an idea such as contrast, and then you spend the whole day only shooting objects that suit your theme for the day. When you get involved in doing this a lot, you start to really understand what certain objects, or colours do for various photos and how you can use them to your advantage. It also helps you to find something interesting in something boring, as you have to try and make everyday objects worth looking at.

I personally recommend starting with colour, because it can be so powerful and challenging at the same time.

How to Capture Awesome Nightclub Photography – 5 Easy Steps

Introduction to Club Photography

Nightclub photography is becoming increasingly popular, with a lot of young photographers using it as their way into finding their first paid photography work, while enjoying themselves at the same time. I often walk straight into clubs with no photo pass or anything, just a camera slung round my neck, and nobody ever asks any questions – it’s a great way to start getting more experience.

Step 1 – Technique and Equipment

You’ll find that you’ll start to employ a lot of techniques from low light photography, night photography, light painting and slow sync flash, as you’re often left to make do in low light. As far as gear goes, if you want to actually come out with some good photos, you really need to have an external flash, but you can get away without one if you’re doing basic slow sync flash.

Here’s the kit that I use:

A camera body, preferably a newer one as they deal with high ISO a lot better.
Wide aperture lens, preferably f/2.8 and below, with the lens hood on (we’ll get to that).
A wide angle lens, so that you capture a lot is cramped conditions.
An off camera flash with a diffuser if you’ve got one.
A transmitter for you flash would be ideal if you want to up your game.

Step 2 – Setting Up Your Camera

When I walk into a club, the first thing I do is go to the places that I’m going to be spending the majority of my time shooting and find out what settings I’m going to use. Because the lighting is fairly controlled, I can set my camera to manual and set up different exposures for different situations and then save them to my custom dials.

A great way to ensure that you include enough ambient light is to set your camera to aperture priority with your ISO set and your aperture wide open and see what it tells you. I did this about half way though the night as it just confirmed my beliefs that it would be around 1/13. If you’ve got custom dials, I strongly suggest you look up how to set them on your camera as they can come in very handy (it’s easy to do), but if you don’t, then don’t worry, just keep your camera on manual. The two different places I might find myself shooting are in the crowd and at the DJ booth, so I adjust my camera for those.

For the majority of my shots, my ISO is set to somewhere around 1000-1600, my aperture is almost always completely open (which will be f/2.8 for most of these photos), and my shutter speed ranges anywhere between 1/8 to 1/50 of a second. The ISO and aperture deal with all the ambient light whereas the shutter speed is used to freeze the motion, with the help of an off camera flash.

Step 3 – Different Photos To Take

There are five main shots that I like to take:

DJ photos
Crowd
Venue
People
Staff

Starting with the obvious, you’re going to want to take photos of the DJ, especially if they’re a big name act and not just the house DJ. The way this differs to the rest of the club is that there is usually more lighting so that the DJ can see what they’re doing, which can often ruin the shot. For the photo below, I set my camera to f/2.8, ISO1000, at 1/25 of a second and pointed my flash upwards at quarter power without a diffuser cap, but the little white reflector sticking out. This shone enough light onto the subject while giving them the dark eyes I was looking for. The slow speed and wide aperture allowed some ambient light onto the DJ’s shirt which helped to make it more interesting.

When you compare that you a higher budjet production of a dance music festival, you have a lot more light to play with and you’re not bothered by the small table lamps which are lighting up the equipment. I had so much more light to play with, my ISO was on 1250, aperture was set to f/2.8, but my shutter speed was set to 1/1000 as this DJ was prone to faster movement than this. I’ll move on to more creative photography for DJ’s in a bit.

Crowd shots is something the promoter is going to be looking for as it helps them to promote their night, so you’ll want to make sure that you get as many of these as possible, particularly during the headline act. If you’ve got a flash then it’ll likely come in quite handy if you’re taking photos of small groups of people like in the club that these photos were shot. The light would be lost in larger clubs, but there would be a lot more lighting to help make up for that. Have a look at the photo taken below which used a flash, and then move on to the photo I took without to see the difference. This photo was shot at 1/13 of a second to allow the light and smoke from behind to creep through.

When you’ve not got a flash, you can rely on the club’s lighting a lot of the time, but you will want to turn up your shutter speed as movement will be detected a lot easier without a flash. The photo was shot the same as the one above, only I turned up the shutter speed to 1/50 to freeze the motion. The photo below is one of the reasons I enjoy taking photos at live music events – the lighting allows you to get a lot more creative.

Venue shots are important because they’re used to promote nights over Facebook so try to include a few of them. I’ll go into more detail about how to take these photos so that they’re a little bit more interesting, but for now we’ll focus on exposure. This photo used a flash, but it was diffused and bounced off a wall so it’s well hidden. Again, the photo was shot at f/2.8, ISO1000 at 1/40 of a second.

Photos of people are fairly important as promoters often use this to promote their night again, by watermarking the images and tagging the photos so that people can see them. I don’t have an ultra-wide angle lens but these are typically used to capture as many people in the photo as possible while providing a cool fisheye effect. I personally think that this is a little bit over used and doesn’t look very original anymore. Again, ambient light is key here so keep the settings much the same, and if you don’t want the photos to look flat, point your camera upwards and use a diffuser on it to act as a light box.

Lastly, if I know the staff want photos, or it’s a particularly special occasion, I’ll try to take photos of them too. This is good for when someone wants to become the face of the night and not a name, and you’ll often find this happens with much smaller nights. The settings you might use are much the same as the other photos, depending on the location, but you have much more freedom to play around as you can take them pretty much wherever you want.

Step 4 – What to Watch Out for

This is a small list on how to look after your gear in a nightclub environment:

Drinks. They get spilt by drunk people all the time so watch out for anyone who’s had too much to drink, and keep the lens hood on your camera to protect from any splashes.
Thieves. Nightclubs are probably a bit worse for people stealing stuff so either keep everything on you where you can look after it, or keep it somewhere that you know is safe, like in the DJ booth or with the promoter.
Loud music. Pick up some earplugs at the beginning of the night as you’ll likely be subjected to a lot of bad/loud music which will damage your hearing before long.

Step 5 – Ideas For Different Styles

Context is important in anything you take a photo of, and this can be done pretty simply by following the rule of thirds and including some background detail to a photo. Again, I know I’ve been banging on about this, but if you want it to work, you’ve got to include some ambient light. Contrast that with a flash like I’ve done below and you’re onto a pretty good thing.

Slow sync flash allows you to capture the movement of a subject without producing a blur which takes away all the detail. I’ve written a whole blog post on it which can be found here, but it’s pretty simple to get your head around. Play around with the shutter speed to match the speed of movement of your subject and you’ll soon come up with some cool photos. Again, this works better in more exciting lighting as it produces a more interesting effect, but if the lighting is particularly dull, try and use the lights from the DJ mixer to produce some light trails.

Black and white photos are really good at producing a certain mood and they’re very useful if the lighting isn’t very good. The style of music which was being playing the the photo below was very bass heavy and minimal, so using black and white worked really well.

How I used Light Painting to Capture this Photo of a Model

In this new series entitled ‘Shoot My Shot’, I’m going to show you a photo that i’ve taken and the steps that I took to get there to help you understand how the Pro’s take their photos and to reassure you that we get just as many misses for just 1 hit!

What You’ll Need

A model – doesn’t have to be a pro, just a willing participant
A tripod to keep things steady
A shutter release cable to minimalise camera shake (optional)
A roundabout or another moving object
An external flash that you can fire at will

The Light Painting Concept

The concept for this photo was to make it appear as if the same girl was in multiple places in the same photo at the same time. I’m using a concept known as light painting that you can read more about my clicking on the link. Couple things to note before we get started; the model I used was an absolute pro, but I still had to be quick as it was freezing out and she as sitting on metal roundabout, also it’s dark out so it was hard to compose a shot with very little light. Before I show you where I started, have a look at my final image:

Below is my first image, and as you can see, there’s plenty wrong with it. For a start, the model is only in the photo twice and they completely overlap. Also, there’s too much dead space at the top of the photo and it’s slightly off center. The settings used for this photo were ISO 320, f/5.6 for 4 seconds. The first thing I noticed is that 4 seconds was nowhere near long enough to get the photo that I wanted, I increase that to 15 seconds for the rest of the photos. This will allow the model to appear more then twice in the photo and have the flash appear from more angles.

For my next shot, I used a longer shutter speed and that allowed me to move the model around the image more times without having to worry too much about the time. I also straightened up the image a bit and pointed the camera down slightly. Even with the longer shutter speed, I didn’t pay enough care and attention as to where exactly the model was positioned when I set off the flashes, and because I had the extra time, I ended up setting off too many flashes and that made the photo quite messy. For the rest of the photos, I decided to stick to just 3 carefully chosen positions. Another couple things I noticed are that I didn’t step far back enough when setting of the flashes and you can clearly see my foot on the left and also, the photo still is not quite symmetrical yet. Time to take another photo.

This third photo is certainly a step in the right direction, but with 3 main flaws, the most obvious of which is the red line running across the middle of the photo. This came from the light on my flash indicating that it was ready to set off another strobe of light, I need to keep this covered in future or it’ll ruin the shot. Secondly, and less noticeable to most, is that there’s still too much dead space at the top of the photo, I need to either zoom in or recompose the shot. Finally, the model simply doesn’t stand out enough, and this comes from there not being enough light in the photo; the best way to counter this is to set off more flashes for each position – previously it was only 1 or 2.

Finally I managed to frame the shot just how I wanted it in this photo and I did so by zooming in by 4mm in focal length (if you want to understand focal length better, click on that link). Now this is a lot better then before, the whole composition is a lot better and the positioning of the model is nearly perfect. The positioning of the model in the center still isn’t quite to my exacting standards and there’s still not enough light on the model in the 2 other positions so it’s time to go back and take one more shot.

This is much more like it. Whenever I start out with a photo, I like to try and picture the best result I could hope for in my head and this is basically it. Considering how the model is sitting, having her head off center really helps with the balance of the photo as her legs go off to the right of the frame, it also means that she’s not overlapping the other exposures of herself. In post production I slightly increased the exposure and did a tiny amount of cropping, just to satisfy my eyes, and i was done. Hope you like it!

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and we’ll get back to you.

How to Photograph Light Painting

Why you Should be Light Painting

What is Light Painting?

Light painting is opening your camera’s shutter up for a long enough time so that you can draw in the darkness with a light source such as a torch or a lantern and effectively paint inside a photo. This is not to be confused with light graffiti, which is much the same, the difference being that you’re using the light source as the subject to create some cool shapes in the air, rather then using it to paint light onto a dark scene.

What do you need?

You will need the following items:

A camera that you can set to manual
A tripod to hold the camera steady
A dark location
A light source to paint the scene
A remote for your camera’s shutter to minimalise camera shake (optional)

Getting Started

The first thing you’re going to want to find is a good, dark location. Light painting adds to the interest of the photo so actually finding a location worthy of a photo shouldn’t be too hard. For my first shot i’ve chosen the breakwater down my local beach at low tide. Next thing you’ll need to do is set up the shot.

Once you’ve found where you want to put your tripod, the first thing I like to do is focus. I like to bring a lantern along with me that I use to paint with and place it about a third of the way into the scene, and manually focus on it. The reason i use manual focus is because autofocus will have a lot of trouble focusing exactly where you want it to in these conditions. If you have live view, I recommend using it now as you can digitally zoom in 10 times onto exactly what you want to focus on and have it displayed a lot larger and therefore have it focus more accurately.

The next step would be to set your ISO, shutter speed and aperture. Because the exposure is quite long, you don’t want the ISO to be too high or the photo will come out quite grainy, I like to set mine to 400 as it allows me the sort of detail i’m looking for in the sky even though i’m not painting onto it. Shutter speed depends on how much light i’m working with really, but my main ‘go to’ speed it about 30 seconds, but can be as slow as just a couple of seconds in the right conditions. Finally, I usually stick the aperture on about f/5.6 as it allows the depth of field i’m looking for, without the letting too much light into the camera so that i can still use a long shutter speed.

For this first demonstration in light painting, i’m going to be using torches, the second demonstration uses flashes.

Light Painting with Torches

From a couple test shots, I decided that shooting down the breakwater didn’t really have the effect i was looking for. Have a look at the photo below and you’ll see what i mean; with the torches i have with me, they didn’t really do the job. Also, it’s pretty hard to stand in the frame and paint at the same time as you’ll cast a lot of shadows and the camera will likely pick up the ends of the torches, resulting in this unwanted messy effect.

A much more effective way to do light painting is to choose a certain area in the frame that you want to highlight and only paint part. In my next 2 shots, i chose part of the foreground to paint and played around with that for a little bit. The combination of the torch light and the lantern blocked by the breakwater feels unbalanced though so i decided this still wasn’t the shot that i was after.

I moved down the beach a bit for my next shot and pointed my camera in land. One of the great things about light painting at night is that you can you play around with your white balance and it doesn’t even matter, because you can make the colours whatever you want. The sky is orange due to the light pollution in the area, but the sand has a violet hue because i changed the white balance to white fluorescent light. This makes the photo look like it’s from another planet which can be a lot of fun to play around with.

When i was walking around the beach I noticed this dynamic asymmetry that had been staring me in the face for the past 20 minutes. The key features in the photo below are symmetric, while the surrounding objects in the scene balance the photo with their asymmetry. For the first photo with this set up, I just used the lantern as a light source which cast some interesting shadows around the photo. This photo was taken at ISO 400, f/5.6 at 30 seconds. I really like this photo, but it is lacking the real light painting effect i’m after, so for my final shot, i used the same settings but this time shined a torch onto the center support. The darkness is still balanced by the shadows on the outer beams and behind the rocks, but you get a real sense of light painting and it looks a lot more striking now. The overall effect is similar to that of an HDR (high dynamic range) photo, but without the unnecessary over-saturation that’s often found. When i’m light painting, I like to walk around the subject and point the torch from all different angles to really make it stand out. Here’s my finished photo. As you can see, it’s fairly easy to take an otherwise ordinary, everyday scene and make it much more interesting with the use of light painting. I recommend taking whatever portable light sources you have and going out with a friend one evening, it can be a lot of fun.

Here’s a couple more examples of light painting created using torches: The first was shot at ISO 100, f/4 at 30 seconds and the second photo was shot at ISO 100, f/3.5 at 30 seconds.

Of course, you don’t have to only use torches, you can get very interesting effects using external flashes.

Light Painting with External Flashes

Here’s the basics of how it works: The flash from a camera freezes the scene because in a dark situation it’s likely the only light the camera will see. To layer a photo, all you have to do is add more flashes, which captures the movement. In my first example below, I set off 4 flashes of a moving swing to capture it exactly how I wanted it. This took a lot of trial and error to get the timing, angle of the flash and a speed of the swing all right. ISO 320, f/5.6 at 15 seconds with 4 flashes.

Another idea I had was to add a person into the photo and capture their movement. Again, this took a little trial and error, but less so than the previous shot as I was used to it by then. Same settings used here as the above photo.

Have a look at these last 2 photos where you can see that I actually walked around the photo setting off the flashes lighting up the scene from different angles. The light from the flashes become an important element to these photos and is just as important as the subject itself. For the first of the 2 photos I added movement to the roundabout and that in turn make the photo more interesting and shows how the light painting effect works. For the second photo I lowered the flash and it actually ended up being on of my favourite photos of the night because the reflections on the roundabout made it look like a stage.

As I hope you can see by now, there’s no real rules to light painting, it’s just a case of taking the time and effort and having fun. Try and experiment with your photos by adding different coloured flashes, along with glow-sticks and lasers into the mix.

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and we’ll get back to you.