Create awesome photographs at night with light painting

One of the things that I love most about photography is showcasing the delicacy of light. Photography at night is one of the most difficult environments that a photographer can shoot in. With any long exposure photography, a tripod is a must-have.

One of the masters of light painting is Dave Black. As a sports photographer, Dave Black understands the importance of photographing movement. When you combine movement with light and long exposures, Dave Black creates stunning light painting photographs that are beyond jaw-dropping.

In homage to Dave Black’s light painting style, here’s an image that I took while on a photo excursion workshop in a Victor, Idaho barn. Armed with Yongnuo speedlights, 10 friends and I lined our tripods up inside this barn, turned off the lights, set our delayed shutters, and began walking around light painting the barn.

The reason I chose to show you guys this picture was because I love how it shows what light painting really is. Plus, I must admit Christine Taylor’s pose over to the left is pretty sweet as she flashes the person coming up the stairs with her awesome speedlight. (:

Light painting with people can be tricky, but if you add special effects such as fog and then top it with a creepy mask, you can get away with small movement that just adds to the photo. This was taken underneath that pioneer wagon you can see in the picture above.
Here’s another light painting of a shed on the same property. On this image, I actually placed an abstract light painting of a light orb that I took and made it look like an isolated set of star trails. Something that I want to point out about this picture is the two different color temperatures of the lights that were used to light paint this shed. The left side was light painted with an LED light while the right side of the shed was light painted with a halogen light. While most light painting is typically done with halogen lights, LED lights work just as well when it comes to light painting.

FAUX BOKEH

Bokeh, or background blur, is probably the most desired aspect when it comes to photography. By modifying the typical light painting technique, you can achieve this “faux bokeh” effect. First, you light paint the subject with your camera in focus. Then, you throw your lens out of focus using the manual focus ring and finish light painting the rest of the image. The hard part with light painting faux bokeh is to not paint over the same section in either round.

ABSTRACT

You guys should know by now how much I love abstract photography. What I love even more is when I can combine abstract photography with light painting. Photographing a light orb is super fun, yet is super challenging because you need to make sure you start your shutter at the right moment so you have a perfect overlapping light orb. Typically when photographing a light orb, you have a shutter speed of around 30 seconds. However, when photographing this light dome, I decided to get down on the ground of the barn and actually speed up my shutter speed. By speeding up my shutter, I was able to get some cool abstract shots which I then moved around in Photoshop and recolored to give a nice variation between these three.