Light Painting

What's Light Painting?

Light painting is an imaging technique that uses a moving light source to add light to an under-illuminated subject while taking a long-exposure photograph. A scene or object can be brought to life by painting with a beam of light! You, the photographer, becomes an artist, and instead of just capturing an image as presented, with light painting you create the image that the camera is capturing. Light painting may take lots of patience and practice to perfect, but the results can be very rewarding. But let’s not make this sound too complicated – light painting is a lot like any low light photography, except in this scenario we are putting an outside light source in motion to enhance an image.

How to do Light Painting

One of the most important tools to produce light paintings is a tripod. In most cases your shutter is going to be open for several minutes and it is very important that your camera does not move during the exposure.

Many different types of lights can be used to do light painting. These light sources are your brushes and may include: flashlights, torch lights, lasers, glow sticks, flash or strobes, cell phones, or even candles. Just about anything that can produce light can be used as a brush to do light painting. Different light sources will produce different colors of light. For example, a LED light source will produce a cooler (blue) colored light, while a halogen source will produce a much warmer (orange) colored light.

Use your camera in manual mode, so you can set the shutter speed and aperture.