How to paint with light

I’m sure you’ve seen light paintings like this one before. Painting with light is a technique that’s been around since the days of film. All it requires is a camera which has a controllable exposure, a dark environment, and some lights. You can paint anything with light. This streaky pinpoint light effect lets you write or create fine lines in the air… similar to streaking tail lights on the highway, and using the same principle. You can also light a regular subject using bursts of light from a flashlight or strobe.

As with a lot of fotohacking, experimentation is key – but the real trick is to open your aperture fairly wide (this one was shot at f/2.8) and set your camera to a long shutter speed. Unfortunately, as long as my Nikon D70 would go is 30 seconds without using bulb, so that’s what I did for this shot. Use a remote or the self-timer so that you have no movement in the camera when the shutter is depressed.

Once you’re exposing, you can run around with lights and illuminate whatever you want. With small LED lights, you’ll get a finer streak and are able to write (albeit backwards) in the air. With a wider or more diffused light, you’ll get more general illumination, and you can light up segments of your environment.

Make sure you don’t have any ambient light coming in to the frame that might ruin the shot. This was an indoor shot, so I shut off all the lights, closed the curtains (to avoid street light pollution) and shut down anything with an LED. Outdoors would be a little trickier… and you would need to watch for traffic or street lights, as well as any possible lights in the sky. Even dim light will register as something much brighter when you expose it for 30+ seconds.

Another good tip for light painting is to have someone hold a black card over the front of the lens during a bulb exposure, while you move in and around the shot, setting up different lighting. Remove the black card when you fire the lights. The less exposure information the camera needs to record during periods of “blackout” the better – as it will save you from accumulating excess noise and any possible ambient light artifacts.