Thursday, December 11, 2008

Drawing with a flashlight

I had always wanted to try out light drawing, so one night I grabbed a few LED flashlights and setup my camera in the kitchen with the lights off.


I was lazy so I just put the camera on the counter and aimed it toward the family room. I had my 24-70mm f/2.8 lens mounted and left that wide at 24mm. The shots were all taken with a 25 second exposure at ISO 100 and an aperture of f/13.


Drawing with LEDs and flashlights is a lot tougher than I thought it would be. After dialing in the exposure (the easy part) I had to mentally create a frame in my mind that was roughly the size of the image I'd be capturing. This was the canvas I drew on. The hard part was keeping the image in my head so that I could complete lines and add elements without "drawing" over areas I'd already passed my light through.


I only shot 12 exposures, checking back on the camera's LCD screen after each one, and the last 4 images actually turned out fairly well. Next time I attempt this I'll try drawing on objects and will keep the shutter open a bit longer to capture more of the background light. But, for a first attempt I'm pretty pleased.








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