Painting with Light
I got pretty lazy with the 2nd half of this week’s assignment. I was supposed to “shoot a small to medium sized object (between mouse and human sized, so not a house or a room) and light it with a single light source.” While I didn’t do that specifically this week, although I’d argue that many of my photos use a single light source, particularly since I shoot indoors a lot. Here’s an oldie but goodie, shot before I got the hang of manual settings. (Macro mode all the way!) The light source is overhead tungsten. I’d describe the light as neutral – not really warm or cool. It’s lit well, though, because you can see the detail in the plane nose and the dust on the mirror ledge.
But now for the title of this post, we experimented with “light painting”, which can be accomplished by holding the shutter open for a long time in a dark room (I think we tried ranges from 6-30 seconds) and moving a light within the frame. Since the person holding the light is moving relatively quickly, you don’t really see them (perhaps a ghost of them), but the trail of the light is very distinct. Here are some examples.
For the first two, the shutter is open, but the room light is still on:
First attempt of “Hi” with the Flashlight app on my iPhone looks more like “Poi”:
Almost there…. We used a pen light for this one and realized that we need to turn the light off an on as we drew the lines.
Success! (Although the penmanship is poor):
With some practice, maybe I’ll pull off some shots as awesome as these.