First of all, what exactly is a “light painting”? To quote Wikipedia: “Light painting, also known as light drawing or light graffiti, is a photographic technique in which exposures are made usually at night or in a darkened room by moving a hand-held light source or by moving the camera...” Most of the tricks and techniques can be done right in-camera, without the need for Photoshop software or any image editing program (although these do a great job on enhancing the photos).
Before we start diving into the chapter to learn how to use different light-toys to create beautiful illuminated photographs, let us first discuss how to use the settings on our camera.
Setting the Shutter Speed
The shutter speed will be determined by you and how long you think it will take to make your light painting. In all DSLR cameras, there is a piece of cloth or plastic that is between the lens and the camera's sensor. This cloth is called the “shutter”. When you push the button on your camera to take a picture, it opens the shutter for a duration of time, and then shuts it back up again to stop the exposure from taking place. Hence the term “shutter speed”.
Let's go over this chart from left to right. On the very left we see “B or BULB”. BULB mode is basically a manual setting for shutter speed. It means that if you hold your finger down on the shutter button for 5 seconds, the exposure will be taking place during the 5 seconds you have your finger on the button. If you hold it down for 50 seconds, the exposure will be 50 seconds.
After BULB mode, moving to the right of the scale, we see 30”. This obviously means 30 seconds, and is the usually longest shutter speed available on most DSLR cameras. You can get into longer exposure times by either using a cable release, a wireless remote, or simply holding the shutter button down for a really long time in BULB mode. When it comes to going past the camera's maximum shutter speed, not all cameras are alike, so you will have to figure out which method works with your specific camera.
Next, after 30”, the shutter speed simply gets faster and faster. As you can see, everything after 1” turns into fractions of a second. Most camera's just display a number like “125” to represent “1/125th of a second”, so don't get confused and mistake “125” for “125 seconds”. Look at it as a fraction.
You can set your camera to take different durations of shutter speed. Here are some examples:
B or BULB, 30”. 25”, 20”, 10”, 5”, 1”, ½, 1/5, 1/10, 1/100, 1/250, 1/500, 1/1000, 1/4000, 1/8000
Here is a popular long exposure trick that you have probably seen a dozen times: Traffic.
The reason why the moving car lights look like long lines is because this photograph had an exposure time (shutter-speed) of 15 seconds. If the exposure time was 1/200th of a second, the car lights would look like dots and not lines (just like they do in real life).
You might be asking “How come I can't see the actual cars?”. The reason why you can't see the actual bodies of the cars is because they are in constant motion and not enough light was shining on them to make a noticeable trail. The same thing happens when you are holding a light and doing a light-painting. The reason why you can't see the light-painter's body is because they don't have enough light hitting them while they are moving around. If they were wearing glowing clothing, however, then that would be different!
The opposite is also true. If you were holding a candle in front of you but you were completely still, then your body would appear in the photograph. This is why we can see the trees and snow in the photograph above, because the foreground was stationary and was being lit up by the sky (and also by the traffic).
Setting the Aperture
The aperture is how wide the hole in your lens is. It is very similar to your eyeball's pupil. The bigger the diameter, the more light hits your camera's sensor. So, the bigger the opening, the brighter the image! Sometimes you will hear people refer to the aperture as the “F-Stop” number. It's the same thing.
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For light painting, adjusting the aperture is mostly used for adjusting how bright your light source will appear to be. As we can see in the example above, no other settings were changed in these three photographs except the aperture. The only thing visible at F36 is the streaks of light. When we move down the line to F6, we see that the light streaks are much brighter plus we can see more ambient light around the environment from the original light source.
There is also a side effect that comes with the aperture, and that is called Depth of Field. To give an example of what depth of field is, take a look at the two examples below. The one on the left has an aperture opening of F11, and the one on the right has an aperture of 2.8.
F11 F2.8
As you can see, the depth of field determines how deep or shallow the focus plane is. Using smaller F numbers will make the hole (aperture) in your lens wider, thus making your depth of field more shallow. Using larger F numbers will make the aperture smaller, creating a deeper depth of field.
Setting the ISO
The ISO (also known as 'ASA' or simply 'film speed') determines how sensitive your sensor is to light. The higher the ISO number, the brighter your image will be. The lower the ISO number, the darker your image will be.
Now I know you are thinking “Great! I'll just use the highest ISO possible to make my image as bright as I can, then I'll just stop down my F stop to make up for the difference!” Well, sadly but surely there is a side effect that comes along with ISO, and that is called noise.
Noise is basically color grain that destroys the fine detail and color in your photographs. Always try to use the lowest ISO you can, especially when doing long exposure work. I usually try to keep my ISO in the 100-400 range.
The only situation where you will need to use higher ISO numbers is if you are in a dark environment with no tripod available. What your camera will do is open up the aperture all the way to let as much light in as it can, and then set the shutter speed for several seconds to let in even more light. Because we humans can't hold a camera perfectly in place for several seconds, our image would be very blurry. So, in order to get around that, we would have to use higher ISO numbers in order to compensate for the long shutter speed. If we had a tripod however, this would not be an issue. If you want professional quality photos that were taken in dark environments, you will have to use a tripod and a low ISO.
Setting the White Balance
The white balance is basically color correction right in your camera. If the light you are photographing has more cold/blue tones, you will want to raise the white balance to a warmer/redder color temperature to even out the tones.
Look in your camera's manual to figure out how to change the white balance preset and set your own custom white balance. The process for setting the white balance is different for every camera so I cannot explain how to do it in this ebook. Use Google or your camera's manual instead. Of course, if you don't want to mess around with it, just leave it on Automatic.
The photographs on the right were taken on a sunny day. The rocks were only slightly shaded by a tree.
These basic white balance presets should be on your DSLR and are probably ordered in the exact same way:
•Incandescent/Tungsten (2500-3000K)
•Fluorescent (~4000-5000K)
•Daylight (~5200)
•Flash (~5400K)
•Cloudy (~6500-8000K)
•Shade (~8000-10000K)
•Custom / Saved Preset / Set Color Temperature
So how does white balance pertain to light painting? Well, different types of lights produce different types of color temperatures. The light you see on the right side above the piano is a key chain LED, and the light on the left side of the piano is an incandescent Maglight flashlight bulb.
The light on the right produces cooler tones than the one on the left. The white balance for this particular image was set right in the middle at 5000K. Can you guess what white balance would make the right light white? (wow, say that five times fast!) What about the one on the left? The answer: 2500K for the left, 10000K for the right.
Generic Common Settings for Light Paintings:
Although each setting on your camera will be dependent on the lighting situations, here is a generic combination of settings that you can use as a rule of thumb if you are confused:
Put your camera on a tripod and use Manual Mode and manual focus, lower the ISO number as low as it can go. Have your aperture at F5.6 and your shutter speed at 5 seconds. If you want to make the photo brighter, change the aperture to a smaller number (like 2.8). Adjust your shutter speed as necessary.
That is the bare-bones-basic-generic-rule-of-thumb setting for long exposure work. Drawing with light is – for the most part – really easy and fun, even though it can be challenging to get things just right. For your first try, simply wait until it is night time, put your camera on a tripod, and put your camera on manual mode with the settings above applied. Then take anything that illuminates or glows (like a cellphone or glow stick, for example) and wave it around about 5 feet from the camera while it is taking an exposure.
Oh but wait! There is a helpful tip about focusing that I should mention before we move on. In order to help set your focus point in the dark, simply place an LED or flashlight facing the camera on the spot where you want to focus. Focus on the light until it becomes sharp, then switch to manual focus so the camera won't try to keep auto focusing, and you're set to go.
