Light Painting Ideas

Take the Light Painting Challenge!

Light painting is a ton of fun. It’s a great magic trick with a real camera. Sorry for those of you who only have a cell phone for this one.

What you do is that you take a very long exposure photo and while the photo is taking, use a bright light, flashlight or something, to draw in front of the camera. There’s a number of difficult things here.

  1. You need at least a 10 second long exposure but 30 seconds is better
  2. At 30 seconds, you need your aperture to be as closed as possible
  3. Also at 30 seconds, you’ll need to have your ISO at 100 or so
  4. You will need your camera to be incredibly still to get a crisp shot
  5. Anything moving in your photo might not show up in the final shot

Even with all that, your picture might get completely blown out which is photographer speak for way to much light making the photo unusable as it’s all white.

You’ll need to practice on this one quite a bit.

I’ll post the examples and update this page once I get them off my camera.

Take the Light Painting Challenge!

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