Tag: light painting

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Beginner Photography: Long Exposures

Happy Spring for those of you in this part of the world! It doesn’t feel like it yet, but I can’t wait for it to get warmer and drier so I am motivated to get out and shoot more.

This week’s live show topic is long exposures, which I really hadn’t attempted before. But a month or so back we had a party for my stepson’s birthday and our friends brought sparklers. I thought it would be a great time to try out some impromptu light painting. These wound up being abstracts, which I love, not the intentional kind of light painting that you generally see. Those are a bit more complex and you can learn multiple ways to do it from Tony’s video here:

I think my kids would love to try those as well, so maybe we’ll attempt them in the future.

So all it took to capture these photos was some experimenting with the shutter speed. I took some of just the firecrackers burning, but I didn’t find those too compelling. The ones I liked the best had the eerie ghosting of the kids moving through the frame around the light. Others, I chose to pivot myself while the shutter was open to create light trails. 

f/3.6, 5 sec, ISO 640

 

f/3.6, 3.2 sec, ISO 320

 

F/3.6, 5 sec, ISO 1000

 

The first two images I converted to black and white in Lightroom and adjusted the exposure. The colors in the shots weren’t very pleasing and didn’t add anything to them. In the last shot however, I adjusted the white balance to make the yellow lights more blue and thought the abstract look of the whole thing was beautiful.

I thought these were really fun to shoot and I look forward to trying it again, a bit more intentionally next time. 

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Live Show Recap: Light Painting

Hey there! This week we looked at your light painting photos and we got some good ones. And a bunch that were in tunnels.

Click this for joy. Then this to hear Chelsea sing.

Ok, we get into your photos here, these are our faves:

  • Porche. Porsh? Porsha. “Tony Northrup, who pronounces it “Porsh” like an animal”
  • weird HDR ghost town
  • “she’s like the queen of raves“
  • Street Fighter
  • skull
  • don’t start a fire, don’t burn down boats
  • “you just said Greg is cooler?” “the cool judge”
  • abstract
  • Tron mask/light babe “when you find a woman like that, you keep her”
  • spooooky couch
  • grainery “You know what would have been great? If they’d light painted a chicken. No big deal, just a chicken.”

PhotoNews:

  • We tested the Sigma MC-11 adapter. It did not go well.
  • Nikon D500 is here! Might be the best camera of the year. Keep an eye out for our review.
  • Nikon 200-500
  • Canon T6. Meh. It’s a fine entry level. “Come on guys, you gotta keep up with my mom.”

Over to me with some viewer questions:

  • Why does the camera not like LED? We get that answered by a viewer later. Cheap LEDs blink on and off constantly, so it doesn’t give you consistent light.
  • What was the best food T&C had in Portugal? A sandwich with cheese on top soaked in gravy. Bacalhau. “You just offended all of Portugal”

Now let’s take a look at a viewer’s portfolio! Great images, great layout. Pare down your categories since you don’t have enough images to fill each. Less navigation the better.

Alright, let’s look at some more of your photos:

  • “parallelogram” “That’s a trapezoid you noob”
  • “this is what you see when you die”
  • Space Invader! ‘Would you rather have a Pixelstick or a pixie stick the size of a Pixelstick?”
  • “She blinded me with science” “I think it’s an illusion. I’m giving it five stars because I’m confused and disoriented.”
  • LEDsaber
  • FIRE ROPE (please use extreme caution) “You won. You won light painting” “Sorry to everybody else who doesn’t have fire rope.”
  • “sparklers are definitely an outside firework”
  • illuminated rocks
  • real estate

Ok, back to me for some questions:

  • Sony overheating issues? The a6300 overheated for us and wrecked a shoot. A7s has been fine though.

Let’s do some Chit-Chat! Our friend Elias-Emir Mahmood made this cool pop-art logo for us.

  • Tony showed up in a weird futuristic training manual. “Generic business guy”
  • Tony acted.
  • Andre Agassi wore a wig. But before that he had some serious neck beard.
  • Justin explains fire rope. ‘Ok, I sense a tutorial coming up and it’s going to be awesome and probably lethal.”

Ok, let’s blow through some more pictures before we end the show:

And back over to me for a few last questions, my house is very loud:

  • Does music inspire you? “Heck yeah!” “Eh.”
  • What is the connection between programmers and bird photographers? “Just nerds.” Patience, technical stuff. “I don’t believe in that brain stuff.”
  • What’s your experience with vintage lenses, are they viable for videography? None. But if it fits the mood of your video, try it!

And that’s a show! Next week we’ll be looking at fashion photos. Keep an eye out on our blog for some tips!

 

 

 

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How to Create Light Painting Photos

Want to submit your Light Painting Photo to Tony & Chelsea LIVE for review? Watch this weeks episode HERE. It airs Thursday nights at 5pm EST (check your timezone.)

Light Painting

Light painting is manually adding light to a long exposure. During a long exposure (say, 30 seconds,) you can walk through the frame without appearing in the final picture. This gives you the opportunity to walk around a picture and selectively add light wherever you’d like it. To help hide your movements, wear all black.

At its simplest, you might use light painting like a portrait photographer uses strobes—to improve the ambient light by filling in shadows. However, light painting is also a rapidly developing art form where people create amazing pictures using night landscapes and complex, custom-build light contraptions. Though he wasn’t the first light painter, Pablo Picasso showed the world light painting in 1949 when Life magazine photographer Gjon Mili visited him; Picasso had been inspired when Mili showed him his photos of ice skaters with lights attached to their skates, jumping in darkness.

F10-13

Light Painting Tips:

  • Long exposure Use bulb mode (learn how to set bulb mode on your camera here) and a remote shutter timer to keep the shutter open for minutes at a time. (Get a cheap remote shutter timer for Canon and Nikon here.)
  • Light source You’ll need something to “paint” with such as a flashlight, glow sticks, or glow wire.
  • Keep moving Whoever is doing the painting needs to keep moving so that they don’t show up in the shot.
  • Don’t set a fire Be responsible out there, kids.

This is a small excerpt from the Night Photography chapter of Stunning Digital Photography. Read more on night photography here.

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