BMW M6 V10 - Light Painting Process

Car Photography - How to get cool shots by Light Painting

Light Painting a car is an art for it self, but you can get cool shots with some knowledge and decent amount of try and error.

Light Painting is a style of long exposure photography where you use a long shutter speed (from 4-5 to 30 or more seconds) and a movement of a constant light. You can actually use the light source to make shapes and paint. Or as mostly used in car photography you can use the constant light to light your subject while moving around it.

You will need a tripod as the camera needs to stay in the same place. A remote is super useful but you can do it without it if you have a timer on your camera, set it up 10 sec and run to your starting position.

It was a bit early (you can see it was still a blue hour) so the max shutter speed i managed to use was 8 seconds. It is important focus your first shot and than change it to manual focus and don't touch it anymore, so all shots are focused to the same spot. Than you start taking your shots.

First i got behind the car with my light high (you can see it in the 6th photo above) to get the light on the top edge of the car. (i did miss the back of it, where i would like to have a bit stronger line). Then i moved in front of the car and started moving from left to right trying to get light on the main lines of the car. In one of those shots i mostly concentrated on the rims.

When you import your files for editing, the point is to do the same edits to all photos you want to use, because you will combine parts of all of them to get the final shot. After the basic edit to all the shots i used Photoshop to Load Files into Stack (file/scripts/Load Files into Stack). Check the attempt to automatically align source images to be sure if you had some small movement between the shots.

Than you pick your main photo in the stack and start masking in parts that you like from other shots.

We were a bit short on time, so i mostly focused on the side shot. And you can see it on these photos. If i had more time i would concentrate more on the lines. Maybe light it from the sides and get some lines on the hood.

This was also i quick one. All i did is one pass on the side of the car and one pass on the front of it.

Photography Basics: Learn Manual Mode (tutorial, Part 1)
Photography Basics: Learn Manual Mode, Shutter speed (tutorial, Part 2)
Photography Basics: Learn Manual Mode, Aperture and ISO (tutorial, Part 3)
Photography Basics: Learn Manual Mode - Thinking process (Tutorial Part 4)