I am a member of Shrewsbury Photoclub on Facebook and we meet monthly to chat and try different techniques in the social club. This week though there was a field trip to do some light painting. Now it’s getting dark earlier it makes light painting a little easier.
One of the guys in the club does a lot of light painting and he’d offered to hold a session so people could bring their cameras to take photos of the event. Around 15 of us walked to the underside of a bridge over the river Severn. It was under cover in case it was a wet night and there is some graffiti on the walls as people gather under here sometimes.
We all set up our tripods in a line against the one wall eagerly chatting with each other about our settings and connecting our shutter release cables if we had them. I chose an ISO of 200 for the first couple of shots with a Bulb setting on shutter and an aperture of f/4.
Rob got his kitchen whisk out of the bag, stuffed it with light gauge 000 wire wool and then lit it before spinning it around on a chain. By spinning it vertically over a spot on the floor and walking around the spot, whilst keeping the spinning vertical you can paint what is known in light painting as an Orb. For this shot my shutter released and closed again after 10 seconds.
The next shot was Rob and his mate Callum, whilst Callum swung the molten wire wool around in a circle, Rob stood in front of it with an umbrella to protect himself. This is meant to look like liquid fire being thrown at him and bouncing of the brolly. It looked quite effective but I think that I was too keen on capturing more time and as such the picture looked over-full of the sparky lines and the highlights were blown out far too much. This was a photo of 2.9 seconds at f/4 on an ISO of 400 so a stop up from the first image.
This looked a bit on the dangerous side too so I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’ve got safety glasses on and clothes that don’t matter if they get an odd melted bit on them.
For the next image my Canon 5D Mk IV with 24-105mm f/4 lens was set up to capture Rob in an Assassins Creed style coat being rained on without a brolly.
The silhouette of Rob’s personage in this image makes for an intriguing photo but I was off with the focus on his feet and it makes it a poor effort from me. It is tricky to focus when doing this sort of light paintingOnce and the best way to do it is to light up the subject with a torch before focusing on them, turning off the torch and then doing the shot.
With the wire wool finished it was time to play with the LED lights and ElectroLuminescent wire (EL Wire). ROb and Callum had a volunteer stand in the centre of the space and then briefly lit the subject with a torch to illuminate the red cloak, before dancing the blue coloured EL wire around the subject. With the long exposure this blue light becomes something akin to a blue flame or even a weird misty haze. The below shot was 36 seconds exposure at f/7.1 on ISO1600. The higher ISO is needed to pick up the EL wire as it is much more faint than the fiery sparks of wire wool origin. The 36 seconds exposure time was needed as the guy with the wire had to wibble it all around the subject and this took a good length of time.
My issue with this and the other later images, is that the subject.model stood too far away from the wall meaning that the outside scene of trees lit by street lights interfere with the photo. Looking at it again now though it appears as though a window to a nature filled landscape is opened up via some sort or witchcraft derived portal.
These last few images were made with LED lamps in plastic plumbing tubes with regularly placed drilled holes in to allow the light to escape. Different effects were added with the EL wire, a white LED torch on a stick and lots of other smaller LED lights.
It was a good experience to see people who’d never done light painting before get on with this and learned to understand their camera’s settings a little better. It was a nice evening with my friends from the photoclub and afterwards we shared them on the group page so we could all compare the effects of different settings in the cameras.
I can see me using light painting in some of my university work this year but I don’t think I’ll do anything like this. I’m thinking about a flash hidden somewhere to create some long shadows in images and a contrast of light and dark, light and shadow etc.
The more you do this the more you get used it it too, I’d forgotten where the buttons were in the dark on the back of the 5D but soon picked it up again. This is due to me using my small mirrorless more and more but I wouldn’t use that for this event as it’s not quite as flexible or as good in low light at ths 5D. One of the guys I was next to had his Sony mirrorless camera on a tripod and missed a few shots as the camera was optimizing the image after the shot finished. It seemed to take ages, for the noise reduction to finish, whereas my 5D was already for the next photo to hit it’s sensor.
Be First to Comment