Inspirations from Behind the Lens
A few months ago in the Behind the Lens facebook group, Rodrigo and Joseph posted some shots of Joseph’s new car. They did a technique called “Light Painting”. This is something that my friend Brad and I had talked about doing for quite some time, but haven’t had a chance to try it out. Rodrigo sent me some information they used to do the light painting technique and Brad and I setup a time for us to give it a shot.
What is light painting?
Light painting is a photography technique where you do a long exposure shot and use a light to literally paint the light in the photo. You can use any kind of light from flashlights to sparklers. The key is wherever you shine the light, it will show up in the photo. Some people get creative and draw words or images into the photo, and I’ve seen some shots where people use steel wool on fire to create dramatic shots as well. I just wanted to do a standard shot that really enhanced the car using a regular led light.
Brad and I decided to try our hand at light painting using our mustangs as test subjects. We wanted a really cool urban/industrial feel so we spent some time looking for the right location and we definitely found the perfect spot. We get there as the sun was setting and setup our cars so we could get sunset shots before it went completely dark for the light painting shots.
First time! No Problem!
I can tell you there have been many times we’ve tried out new techniques and it just flat out sucked. No matter how much you prepare for something, it doesn’t always equal positive results. This time we were lucky (sort of), the images in the camera of our light painting looked incredible! We kept taking shots trying to perfect the technique; however, we thought we nailed it and would have a bunch of shots to choose from when we got home. This was a good feeling since we found out that light painting a car involves a lot of moving around the car quickly and we were both exhausted from the up and down and moving around for several hours.
Fast forward to pulling the photos off our cameras and we found out they photos weren’t as perfect as we thought. There were several images where we let the light bleed onto us or that we moved too slow and you could see our “ghosting” in the photos. We panicked a little at first, but realized that once we started getting everything tuned in, the photos came our pretty incredible.
Show me the photos!
The way the light painted photos look from the natural light photos is completely different; however, I can’t say I prefer one over the other. They both look incredible, but I am glad I was able to try it out and look forward to doing more light painting in the future. Check out some of the photos from my light painting shoot!
