With the start of the new year, I thought it would be fun to experiment with some new techniques. One of the things that I started playing with is known as painting with light. In a nutshell, light painting is when use light to write or draw things in a picture. Here are some of the things you need to do to be able to paint with light:

1. Set a slow shutter speed
2. Set a small aperture
3. Low ISO
4. Set your camera on a table or tripod
5. Have a steady light source (e.g. LED flashlight)

To understand painting with light, you must first understand some basics of photography.

The main thing to do is to keep your shutter speed fairly slow. When the shutter "clicks", there are actually two such clicks. The first click is the shutter opening to let light in, and the second is the shutter closing to cut off the light. The longer you leave the shutter open, the longer the sensor is exposed to light. When you have a slow shutter speed such as 5 seconds, it takes 5 seconds between the first click and the second click. That means that any motion ends up looking blurry. Which is perfect for light painting.

The next aspect of light painting is using a small aperture on your lens. For those not familiar with aperture, it is the size of the opening in your lens. Think of a lens as like your eye. When you are in the dark, your pupils dilate, in order to let more light in so that you can see better. When it's really bright out, your pupils close close up. Think of how teeny your pupils look when someone shines a flashlight into your eyes. On your camera, this number is the f-stop. The higher the f-stop, the smaller the aperture. On many DLSR lenses, that number is f22. Typically a large aperture really depends on the lens. The really expensive lenses have large diameters, and typically large aperture values can be f2.8, f1.8, f1.4, and on the really expensive lenses, f1.2.

ISO is the sensitivity level. Back in the day of film cameras, this was the ASA value that you'd see on film. Low ISO values are used when you have good lighting conditions. High ISO values are typically used in poor lighting conditions. The problem with using high ISO is that you can end up with pretty grainy photos. High-end DSLRs can still produce pretty good pictures at high ISO (my camera, for example, does a half-decent job at ISO10000). Most point-and-shoot images look pretty cruddy at ISO1600, however.

Now, as for my light painting experiments, I wanted things to be as dark as possible, except for the light that I was using to paint. So I set my camera for a small aperture (f22), a slow shutter speed, and a low ISO (ISO100). For my light source, I used the LED light on my iPhone (I have a flashlight app which produces a constant beam of light). You can also use an LED flashlight, regular flashlight, or anything with a concentrated light source. Here was the result of my first experiment:

Doesn't it look like someone's signature?

I wanted to do something more fun other than randomly waving my iPhone around, so I decided to try writing something. The tricky part was writing in cursive backwards in the air no easy feat, and it took a few tries. Especially since I kept turning my iPhone inwards, thereby losing intensity on the beam. Anyway, here's my final attempt. I'm pretty pleased with the end result. Check it out:

You'll notice the arrow on top. That's my hubby's handiwork. He totally photobombed me. :P He got in on the fun too, and came up with this:

Not a bad light penguin, eh? Even my daughter got in on the fun. This is one of her works of art:

Doesn't it make you think of a Treble Clef? After getting the hang of it, here's one of my later works of art, in honor of Valentine's Day in February:

Towards the end, my hubby and I got pretty creative. He has an iPhone flashlight app that turns the iPhone LED into a strobe light. Here's what happens when you paint with a strobe:

A partial outline of my hubby (he looks like he's got stubby legs - I assure you that he doesn't). Anyway, this was a totally fun experiment, and I am totally psyched to take this to the next level. There are some pretty funky things that you can do with light painting. For your reference, here's a Google search result with some of the possibilities that you have with light painting.