Light Painting

Hey all! I hope you all had a great 4th of July! I thought I would show you light painting this week. It isn't something a lot of people know about but it is super easy and fun to do. To do this, you just need: a camera, tripod, some sort of remote trigger, and a light source. Wait until it gets dusk or is dark out. Set the tripod up with your camera on it. You can either turn your shutter speed way down to like 20 or 30 seconds, or if you have a remote trigger, you can go as long as you want. A remote trigger is good to have because it saves you from having to hit the shutter again and causing camera blur. Start the shutter and then paint whatever you'd like with your light source facing the camera. The camera will capture everything you draw until the shutter closes again. This is really fun to do with sparklers or flash lights. It is harder for glow sticks to show up because their light isn't as bright.
     Light painting is fun because you have so much room to show off your creativity. Something that my professor introduced to us in college, you put a piece of steel wool inside a whisk on a string and you spin it. The effects look pretty awesome. Just make sure you don't wear anything that you care about if it catches fire and you're not in a place that can catch fire. One of our assignments in college was to lay the camera face up at the ceiling, hang a flash light from the ceiling, and spin it while the shutter is open. Gives you a really cool pattern.

 Here are just a few examples of some I've done.