In this post, I'll be going through our process of painting with light using what we had available to us.
The equipment we had available:
Handheld LED lights,
Camera tripod,
Various colours of gels for the lights.
Flashlight with a strobe effect.
Kyberlight saber with changing colours.
Small bedroom
Black backdrop
Duct tape
This project was originally a school assignment for Humber College's photography program. Our class was shown some examples of painting with light and how to do it. We needed our DSLR cameras attached to our speedlights. This turned out to be my favourite assignment of the semester.
The way painting with light works is you need your camera's shutter to be open for as long as you need to "paint" with your light (moving it around in the shot). This is after you have the speedlight quickly fire a short burst of light at your subject (if you have epilepsy seizures from flashing lights this probably isn't something you want to be trying at home). Your camera needs to be perfectly still and the room you're in needs to be pitch black for the best effect. Someone holding the lights (in this case, me) also needs to wear black clothing and constantly move so they don't appear in the shot at all. The subject (in this case, Danny) has the opposite roll. They need to be completely still so they don't appear to be blurry in the shot from the long exposure; as well as wearing bright clothing so they stand out and contrast with the background (if you're wondering about the buttoned shirt and tie, it was originally for another assignment we shot right before this one). Our background was created using a black backdrop that we duct taped to the bedroom wall.
This assignment was so much fun to shoot it actually became less about the assignment and more about coming up with cool ideas we could try. We spent at least a couple hours shooting this project, which was way more than I had intended but absolutely worth it. We tried several different gels wrapped around the LED lights (one at a time) and that became our main technique for lighting the frame. I could only submit one of the images (the one at the top of this page) but I put the rest of the images we liked on this website.
The flashlight's strobe feature gave off a very unique effect. That's how we created the sparks shooting out of Danny's hands in the image at the top of this post. Another example of the strobe effect is this image below where it looks like Danny is deflecting a laser using his Kyberlight saber.
The saber has a wide variety of colours and causes a wide streak behind it, so we came up with the idea of a colourful background instead of pitch black. We did this by having me crouched behind Danny and spinning the saber in circles, changing the colour after each circle.
In the next post below, I will be going through the challenges we faced while shooting this project.