A little bit of light painting

A little bit of light painting

Naturally, when I’ve done this in the past, it’s been with nudes – so the subject has been quite large relative to the torch I used. For this blog, though, I necessarily used a still-life subject which brought me face-to-face with a problem.

Even a pocket LED torch gives a wide beam in relation to the size of the subject… This is easily solved, though – I used a few inches of black electrical tape wound over the torch head and forming a tube in front of it to stop light spilling everywhere. The torch I used was in the £3 offer bin at a garage, and runs on button cells, while having a telescopic handle, like a police asp, so it’s easy to use for close work.



For comparative purposes, I also tried the same thing on my small Maglite torch. It’s 20 years old, and has a conventional tungsten bulb in it. This makes the light very much warmer than the LED torch, and it’s important to bear this in mind when shooting. Whatever source you use, look carefully when you process, and make any corrections you want to. The character of individual light sources can add to the fun if you like the colours they give.

Whatever torch you use, you need to be working in the dark. Even at quite small apertures, any background illumination will makes its presence known in your pictures. I shot at night in a garage with few windows. Earlier experiments in my front room were far less successful, because there are street lights, and the curtains aren’t opaque. And I hadn’t thought of using a black insulating tape snoot!



The essence of light painting is that you don’t do it evenly; you want to create variations of light, dark and midtone. Pick two or three areas that are particularly interesting and which you want to emphasise. It will be sensible to do some arranging of relative positions: although your main focus may be light painting, that doesn’t absolve you of ordinary compositional duties, or of checking for stupid mistakes, like background cloth obscuring part of the subject, as I did in my first attempt (top). The snoot meant that I could use the torch VERY close to the subject: a flash image part-way through the last Maglite shot (bottom) would show my hand and the torch a couple of inches from the roses.



Exposure? It’s very suck it and see, and depends on your torch and how close you put it to the subject. Try stopping well down (f/11 or f/16) and a shutter speed of at least 10 seconds at 100 or 200 ISO. If the shutter speed’s too short, you won’t have time to do any painting: 20 or 30 seconds is probably better. You don’t need to use delayed action, as camera shake – providing you don’t bump into your tripod – isn’t going to be a problem.

There will probably be a delay after exposure: long exposure noise reduction means that the camera will chunter to itself for as long again as the exposure, in most cases. First time out, work quick and dirty, and try several different ways of lighting. When you’ve processed and possibly even posted a picture or two, go back with a refined plan to do what you nearly managed the first time…