This week we decided to do some light painting.  This is a lot of fun as you can take the same picture a hundred times and every time the picture comes out differently.

Light painting is really easy to do though so you keep going until you get a picture you like.  So how do you do it?

Well first and foremost you put your camera on a tripod.  Ideally you should attach a cable release so you don’t have to press the physical camera button to fire the trigger.  Next you find something to shoot.  You can pick anything, but what ever it is it needs to stay still for a number of seconds.

Now comes the fun part, you kill all the lights 🙂 Yup you need total darkness – so you need to do this at night.  Then you set the shutter speed on your camera to around 30 seconds and the aperture to a value that produces a totally black image after the exposure.

So when you take the picture you see nothing!  Now you get a flashlight (torch for you British folks) and while the shutter is open you point the flashlight at the subject and “paint it with light”.

What you light up is exposed.  It’s as simple as that.

The subject I chose for my light painting image was my piano (next to my camera this is my favorite toy).  I try to play every day so spend a lot of time on this instrument and I thought it would make a great picture.  I tried a number of different compositions but liked this one best.

Then I opened the shutter and pointed my flashlight.  I’d love to say this was the first image I shot, but it was actually around the 30th.  So it took 30 attempts to get an image I liked and decided to post.

Hope you like the image.