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MA_Simple Light Painting


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Simple Light Painting

In this lesson I show you the basics of single-exposure light painting photography. All you need is a flashlight, a dark room and a camera on a tripod. This is one of my favorite ways to create interesting images of mundane objects and visually isolate a subject from its background. This lesson is laying the foundation for a set of future lessons that will cover complex multi-shot light painting, which is when you gain much more control over your results. I’ve been painting with light for over 30 years and hope I can get you to enjoy both the process and results.

Note: This was the first time I recorded myself light painting and compared the captured footage to the resulting photographs. I have to say that I think that is one of the best ways to improve your future results. So, I’d suggest, you setup your smart phone to record video and place it near your camera so it has a similar view of the scene. Then, when light painting, feel free to talk to your smart phone to describe what you are attempting to do and your overall mindset (like “I’m painting slower here in the hopes this area will be brighter”. Then when you run into an exposure that has an unexpected issue, just scrub through the video footage and see if you can figure out what caused the issue and what your mindset was when you were lighting that part of the scene. I think I’m going to start recording video each time I light paint in the future.

There are no downloadable practice images for this lesson… you have to shoot your own!