The Blog of Photographer Jacob Vorpahl.
I usually shy away from cheating at things, unless it’s to pull a joke on someone or something similar to that, but I generally don’t like it. However, today, I’m a cheater. I think I took this photo around April or May and just never got around to posting it to Flickr. So, instead of posting a picture that I took today for my daily photo challenge, I think instead I’ll just use this one from six months ago.
One of the first techniques I tried to learn about when I first got into photography as a hobby was something called light painting. For those who don’t what that is, you first set everything up a in a completely black environment. No light sneaking in from anywhere (except the light you’re using to see, which can be turned off when you take the picture). Next you set the shutter on your camera to stay open for a set period of time, with that duration lasting as long or as short as you need. Then, with all of the lights turned off and the shutter open, you take a flashlight or some other light emitting object and you use the light to “paint” the subject of your photo.
This kind of light is different from flash because with a long enough shutter, you can walk all around the set in darkness, turning your light on when you need to paint something. Doing this allows you to get all sorts of angles and isolate areas you want little or no light. With flash, you’d either need a lot of modifiers and flashes to hit many different angles and isolate areas or you’d have to compromise and hit your subject from only a few different directions.
I literally just tried to search Flickr for some pictures to show this style in better form and I can’t find any that do the job. The ones you can blog are all done with crazy light streaks like the one I did in this photo:
This was the first time I ever attempted to do light painting using the light as a kind of pencil, and I only did it to make my then-girlfriend Sarah smile (which she did). A better use is something like this. Look down at Image #8 (I’d post it here but he doesn’t allow it). The photographers name is Dave Black and the first time I saw this photo it was in a Nikon quarterly photo magazine where he described the technique. I found his website and under his “workshop at the ranch” secton he has a number of lessons on techniques, styles, professional approaches, words of wisdom, etc. I’d recommend checking it out.
But, you can see from that image that it can be a very soft and can allow you to accent certain areas very artistically. Unfortunately, light painting is hard with people because in order to paint them they have to remain very still. That also goes for anything that moves or that could be affected by wind or some similar variable. But it can still be very cool to use. Most people don’t seem to use it that way, though, instead wanting to paint using the light like a pencil, similar to the one I posted above. You can also get some interesting effects from that. Try it both of them out, you might come up with something cool, like this:
Magick Candle by koinis
