Light Painting - Long Exposure Photography

It has been a rough couple of weeks here at the Bulldog house. We have some major building works happening and it is taking it out of us all.

I haven't had chance to write about my college lesson last week until now, but I really wanted to update you guys and make a record of it, whilst it is still fresh in my mind!

This week, we focused on 'Long Exposure Photography', specifically light painting.

Light Painting is achieved by keeping the shutter open on the camera for an extended period of time... these were taken using a shutter speed of 15 seconds.

The room we were working in was actually a theatre and was completely blacked out. The tools we used were various coloured LED lights, which were swirled around on stage by our tutor (being very careful not to fall off the edge of the platform in the dark!)

The lights were extremely bright, so the settings on our cameras had to be altered to achieve the black background, as the initial images had parts of the stage lit up too.

We reduced the amount of light that was able to get onto the lens by increasing the F number (I think I was at F13 here) and changing the ISO, being mindful that the images were not appearing too grainy by taking the ISO too high.

We also tried an experiment where one of my fellow class mates volunteered to be the silhouette in front of the lights! This produced a really cool effect ...

And of course, I couldn't get the backgrounds completely blacked out using purely my camera settings due to the bright lights, so there was some post processing in photoshop to remove any unwanted stray particles of light that crept into the images.

Out of 10, I would rate this lesson as a definite 10/10 on the fun scale! If you get chance to try light painting out working with a buddy, I would definitely give it a try!