Fun with flashlights!

Call me a sucker for light paintings but I just love the results and they are kind of fun to make. Unlike some photographers I don’t write things with flash lights or outline objects but I use them to light a scene in interesting ways. For these photos I took a bunch of greenhouses and wanted to make them look more millitary-ish. The two red lights are from two energizer head lamps and the “spotlight” on the door is actually an LED flashlight laid out on the ground across from the door. To bring the ambient light up to an acceptable amount I used a 1,000,000 candlelight powered flashlight that pluged into my car and drove around durring the 12 or so minutes it took to take the photo and lit the scene from all sides.

This photo was created in a much similar manner as the one above only this LED flash light is much smaller and I tried to create a slightly more mysterious scene. I wanted people to wonder why there was a flashlight laying on the ground.

Below is a black a white version of the first attempt were the exposure was too short and I had to boost it in lightroom.

Some basic tips for light paintings:

• Try out different flashlights. Almost all of my light paintings use a bunch of different flashlights.
• If the scene is large thing about getting one very powerful flashlight to move around and provide ambient lighting.
• As with most long exposures at night… use the lower iso setting that you can. These were all shot at ISO 50
• Thing about depth of field. I first tried shooting at F22 but quickly realized that the exposure times were going to be unacceptably long (I had people with me and we were out there for 2 hours just to take these three photos as it was). I settled on F18 and because I was using a wider lens it wasn’t much of a compromise.

Be sure and leave your questions and comments in the comments section.