Photography Magazine

Have you ever heard of the technique called ‘Painting With Light’ ? It is a classic photo technique, and you will be happy to know – requires little other than a camera and a prop. The word ‘photography’ literally means ‘a writing in light’ (photos + graph in Latin). The technique you are about to learn will show you exactly how this is so true. You will only need a camera capable of taking time exposures (the B setting). In fact the compact camera that we used to make this image is a Olympus C5000Z, which in fact does not support time exposures, but does however feature a slow shutter speed of 16 sec, which is adequate to at least learn this effect and use it to get some exciting results. Lets begin!

You will need a camera, a sturdy tripod, a still life subject to photograph, and a hand-held battery operated torch. The torch could simply be the ordinary flash lights (as in the UK usage) you probably already own…we used a miniature torch powered by a single cell. In fact it was a key chain light, and the light is emitted by a single bright LED (Light Emitting Diode). What you REALLY need to understand is something basic about photography – the areas where there is light are ‘exposed’ on the image, and those that do not receive light remain unexposed or underexposed. If you were to leave your camera shutter ‘open’ in a totally darkened room, the sensor (or film) wouldn’t register a thing on it, even if you used a time exposure of 8sec, 16 sec or even a minute or more. However, if you use a torch to expose certain areas of the subject during this time frame, ONLY those areas would appear in the photograph, since everything else would remain underexposed or not exposed at all!

Set up your camera on a tripod, and totally darken the room. We used a model of an engine for our shoot, as is evident from the image. We wanted the front of the engine lit up, and a gradual fade out towards the lower and rear regions. For this, we first shone the torch for a few seconds from the front of the engine, making sure the light source remained outside the frame of composition at all times…then, we quickly moved the torch around the top of the engine to create a unique effect. The torch was aimed directly at the camera during this stage , BUT COVERED WITH A FINGER, so as not to allow flare. The redness that you see on the light trail is thanks to the glow of the blood in the fingertip as the light shines through!

We used f/8, ISO80 and a shutter speed (not really affecting exposure) of 16 seconds, for this image. Experiment with different light sources, and incident (the light source within the composed frame) and reflected (the torch focused on the subject from outside the composition area) to get unique results every time!