Painting with light

Once I had experimented with the use of different shutter speeds, I was asked to create some photographs by ‘painting with light’. Painting with light is when you use a long exposure on your camera then use a light source such as a torch or glowstick to create ‘paintings’ . this can be done in most situations but it usually works best with minimal to no light other than the light source you are using to create your light paintings. Light paintings are created when you move a light source in such a way that you create a pattern or drawing in front of a camera which has been set to have a long exposure. To create my light paintings, I was in a group with 2 other classmates, Nicole and Anzelika. As a group we experimented with different camera settings to try and achieve the best light paintings possible.

Here are the light paintings we created as a group.

This is one of the first light paintings we created. We had the camera set to have an f/8 aperture, the ISO was set to 100 along with a 10 second shutter speed. As this was one of our first light paintings, this was not the most successful. The shutter speed, aperture and ISO were set correctly but the subject of the image is unclear as it proved difficult to create a neat picture the first time we tried as we could not see where we had painted. 

For this light painting we kept all of the camera settings the same as the last one. The only thing we changed about this image is how we created the image. Before we created this image, we thought about how we wanted it to look and tried to recreate what we had thought of.  This image shows a heart with surrounding detailing. I feel that this image worked well however, there was a little too much surrounding light and the background is not completely black as I would have liked. If I was to reshoot this image I would try to get complete darkness when creating the light paintings.

For this image we changed the ISO on the camera to 400 as we felt that the light emitted from the glowsticks we were suing was not bright enough and not being picked up well enough by the camera. To try and solve this problem, we tried increasing the ISO of the camera which would let more light entre the camera. This did not go to plan as there was too much surrounding light meaning that this light was also picked up by the camera making the image not as dark as I would have liked. The only way to solve this problem would have been to eliminate all other light sources from the room, however, I was working in a studio with various other groups doing the same thing so eliminating all other light would have been impossible

After quite a few different attempts at creating a successful light painting, the three of us in my group decided to try and paint a flower using different coloured glow sticks for each of the parts of the flower. For this light painting we changed the ISO to 200 as 100 was not letting in enough light from the glow sticks and 400 was letting in too much of the surrounding light and I feel that this was a good compromise.  Each of us in my group took on a role in creating this flower, I created the centre, Nicole drew the petals and Anzelika drew the stem of the flower. This worked well as the light emitted from the glow sticks to create this image is nice and vibrant, howver there is still too much surrounding light meaning there are unwanted aspects of this image such as the fact that I am visible within the photograph. Ideally, this image would be completely dark with just the image of the flower in the centre.

After we had used the glow sticks to create some light paintings, we decided to try out a different light source. This light painting was created using a torch on a mobile phone rather than glowsticks. This method worked slightly better than using the glowsticks as the light from the torch was much brighter meaning that the camera focused more on this light rather than the surrounding light making the background appear darker. The image created within this light painting is a lot clearer than those in which we used the glowsticks giving the torch a big advantage over the glow sticks, however, the advantage which the glowsticks have is that they come in a variety of colours which can make for more interesting images which include more colours but they are not as bright as those created using torches.