Light painting has been around since the early 1900s. The old films were so slow (ASA 3) that the photographers would take big lights and paint all over the large objects, such as ships and blimps but I have never found one of those images!

The Red Wave Hand: This is done with a silhouette of my hand in one shot, and then taking Christmas lights...held between two people at either end of the studio, and they spin them around like a jump rope. I then copied and pasted them together in Photoshop.

Fast forward to the early 1970s and I saw a picture in a Time/Life book on “Frontiers in Photography” (I think it was) where it showed someone had walked around an apartment hallway and used a flash unit to paint “rectangular” shaped patterns of the strobe all over.

I immediately borrowed a Vivitar 283 and the gel kit that came with it and started playing around with light painting. I also grabbed anything else I could find that made light, light sparklers, kids toys, and flashlights and a car.

Invisible Tree: This was done for a science magazine for a story about how light can make something invisible. I time exposed the tree for about two minutes...as I stood behind it and backlit the branches...and my assistant (modelling) held another spotlight and lit the tree. I then took a piece of bark from the tree (whitish) and walked towards him slowly as he lit the bark (to make the beam three dimensional) I then cloned out the area where the light hit the tree with a piece of the tree line to the right...to make it invisible.

I grabbed a few friends and we headed to the graveyard where I had them raising from the dead and made their faces floating all over. It was like theater and a “B” movie all in one frame! I have been light painting since 1977.


How to do paint with light
Basically, put your camera on a tripod, set up your image, put your shutter on “B” and lock it open with a cable release. Begin by setting your camera at ISO 100 or 200, your f-stop at 11, and for digital people, put noise reduction on high (because time exposures cause reciprocity breakdown in film and noise in digital). I use a Nikon D3, and it is the lowest noise digital light-painting I have seen.

Set your strobe on “auto” and begin by leaving in on f/8. The reason I do this is because when I light-paint (I use strobes for speed, freezing things and color and pattern) it is best to stay close to the object you are light-painting, so that you don’t “spray” light all over the room and wash out your contrast and get ghost images of moving objects (like your scared friends). The eye of the strobe at 18 inches away from a face has a spread that is not wide enough for the eye of the flash to see the center of the exposure, so you are underexposing a stop to keep the center at f/11. Just play around, these are just tips from 30 years of doing this.

Businessman: This is a businessman in front of four foot seamless paper with a fisheye lens. I lit his face with a hand held strobe, as well as made a cube pattern with the strobe (1 inch away from him) down his body. The sparks are done with a lighter and the red and green lights are done with pin lights with coloured gels taped on them (pointing at lens) 

You will eventually learn that you can open up your f-stop for dim lights and shut down for brighter lights (open for dark blues, etc.) and learn how to judge time. A basic flashlight on a person’s face at f/11 using a 100 ISO film or setting at 18 inches away is about 1 second. A flashlight on a person full length 10 feet from the light is about 15 seconds. It won’t take long to figure it out… just play.

The big problem with light painting is ambient light. If you are three feet from a street light… I’d guess you have three seconds to get something done before it starts to really wash out what you do. In a dark room, you can go forever but any light you flash or paint around is bouncing all over the room (light is a particle) and washing out your contrast.  


What equipment?
Gear-wise, make some colored gels for your lights. Figure out a way to both find them and change them in the dark. I wear a belt with canvas bags for all my lights and gadgets. You need a sturdy tripod, a cable release, and a headlamp so you can check your focus and settings and find things in the dark. You will also need some honeycomb grids or black foil to shape and snoot your lights so you don’t spray light all over the place (think of a light as a garden hose with a spray nozzle attached. You do not want all that spray as much as a focused beam… stream?). The rest is just trial and error and what is cool about it is it is all good and a learning experience (and really fun)

Car: This is a fisheye lens time exposed for about 45 seconds. I have a powerful strobe behind the car (and under) and a blue strobe inside the car with blue on it. The rest is done with a deer spot light with a honeycomb gel on it..(from about 10 feet away. I ran behind the model and made those patterns with the light (with blue on it)

Some more concepts

• You can change color balances, colored gels, and shoot RAW now and clone and erase later too.
• You can do multiple focuses during exposures. Focus on your hand 8 inches from the lens and focus out to your house afterwards.
• You can use anything that makes light, from deer spot lights, car headlights, emergency flares, boating distress flares (attracts police!) sparklers, cheap flashlights, expensive flashlights, bike safety blinking led lights, key chain LED lights, toys and if you have a friend with a police helicopter with that bright search light on it you could really go to town and light paint a skyscraper or a mountain with a helicopter.
• You can also just set up a still-life shot or have a friend sit still in a room. The cool thing about light painting is you can have multiple angles of light and have the contrast of having a light close to an object without having to have that light hidden out of the frame. It is also fast and easy for complex set ups like setting lights and grids for a rock band in an alleyway would take forever (and they would get irritated and step out of their position anyway) but I can run in with a strobe, light each of their faces in white light then run in and put colors everywhere (stay away from the faces) and I can even get a friend to light the backgrounds with some other lights or use a strobe to blast the background before we begin light painting. Hang out and let the police come and time expose their flashlights too. A normal frame like that would be 45 seconds. I run around like a modern dancer (Timothy Leary called me a shamanistic light dancer) .
• It’s all good and it is a bit like theater or a movie in one frame. It is also a lot like the same strange feeling that time has past, similar to the old pictures of people from the 1800’s that had to stare at the camera for 2 minutes during exposures, you sense the time passing in the image.
• Put key chain lights on fishing line and spin them around.
• Put sparklers on objects or poles that can be or are moving (golf clubs)
• Put a blinky light on your dog and have them running around the room.
• Get a few flashlights with different types of bulbs so you have different colors.
• Get a super powerful flashlight to do backgrounds and buildings.
• Get a good black ninja outfit together with pockets and a belt system so you don’t show up in shots and you can find things and not lay them down in the grass in the dark and loose things.
• Pay your friends in whatever but make sure they have fun and will do it again.