185/365 Love is in the air

In my book, this kind of light painting never gets old.

It takes me back to being a kid, being a teenager, and, let's face it, being an adult playing with sparklers on the fourth of July. With a sparkler in your hand, who can resist writing their name -- or any other choice of words -- in the air?

I've never seen someone be able to do it.

This is like the indoor, year-round version. I got my inspiration from a blog post I read this week (though I cannot for the life of me find it again). Here's the setup:

I set up my camera on my tripod, set the shutter to eight seconds, and turned the self-timer to trigger after two seconds. I picked point near where I'd be standing in front of the camera, focused, then turned it to manual focus so it would stay put.

For the writing, I stepped about five feet in front of the camera, faced it, covered a flashlight with a pink scarf, and shone the light toward the camera.

For the duration of the exposure, I wrote in the air. I didn't try to write backwards. Instead, I used the magic of Lightroom to flip the photo horizontally once I got it ready for editing.

And voila! Fun! It almost looks like a neon sign.

I want to try a lot more light painting experiments like this indoors when the weather turns cold. The possibilities are endless.

Camera: Canon 40D, 8 seconds, f/3.5 at ISO 100

183/365 Refracted light patterns

Light can behave in some beautiful ways.

I made this photo by shining a flashlight through a purple glass crystal. I laid the flashlight flat on the ground, clamped the crystal to hold it upright, and shone the light through onto two light green sheets of paper.

You can see the purple tint from the light, and I love the spectrum of refracted light through the prism.

I enjoy trying new ways to play with light that stretch beyond the obvious and often-taught methods.

Camera: Canon 40D with 60mm macro lens, 1/60s, f/2.8 at ISO 1250 lit with a flashlight

165/365 Light painting experiment

As much as I enjoy photographing my favorite subjects, it's definitely fun -- and refreshing -- to step out and try something new. Experiment a little.

This week I was inspired by one of the photography blogs I check daily -- Digital Photography School. A contributor suggested a fun project in light painting.

The project was simple: hang a flashlight from the ceiling, turn it on in a dark room, place your camera directly underneath pointed upward, and send the flashlight swinging.

I have a lot of randomly placed, bare hooks in the ceiling at my house, so setting this up was a piece of cake. I used a pocket Maglite as my flashlight, whose beam is only about half an inch in diameter.

By lengthening the shutter speed, and letting the image be captured over a span of 20 seconds or more, and varying the length of the string suspending the flashlight, I got a different result each time.

Cool! These are my two favorites.

Camera: Canon 40D, 25 seconds and 62 seconds, f/22 at ISO 100

152/365 A little light painting

These geraniums have been drawing my eye for weeks, but I've resisted photographing them until last night.

So often, photographers, myself included, put the camera away when it gets dark. But for this photo, I waited until after dusk, instead of catching them in the setting sunlight as I usually do. Then, I took a flashlight out with me and "painted" them.

Light painting is a technique where you use a flashlight -- or a wireless strobe -- to selectively light objects in an otherwise dark room/environment. While the shutter is open, exposing the image, you shine a flashlight over the objects you want to light, in the shape you want, and those are what show up in the final photo. It's as though your scene is a paint-by-number, and you're only choosing to fill in some of the spaces as you "paint" them with your flashlight. Some other examples of how this can work are in this post at Strobist and this Flickr pool.

It can be a really cool technique that I often forget about -- but I'm going to try to change that. It makes me think outside the natural-light box.

Camera: Canon 40D on a tripod, 1s, f/4.5 at ISO 100 outdoors after sunset at about 9:30 p.m., "painted" with a flashlight.