Painting With Light - Part One

There are (at least) a couple of different ways to paint with light and formats one can try.

Film or digital are your primary choices and both work equally well; however, with film the results are delayed by time spent processing. Whereas, using the digital format, you can see your images and the results immediately. Moreover, using digital, one can tweak technique, lighting, and exposure times on the fly rather than wait on film processing.

In the days when film was king, and there was no digital format available, fashion, product, and portrait photographers would place Polaroid film backs on their cameras in order to get fast images to check their lighting, set up, etc. without needlessly wasting time, film, and effort with processing only to be disappointed and having to re-shoot. This technique seems primitive now to those who have known only digital but the use of a Polaroid back was state of the art at the time. Ironically, many professional photographers today, still using large or medium format film cameras, now place digital backs on their film cameras to view fast results of their product set up or model.

My first try at painting with light was with film (since at the time digital was unheard of). The attempt began as an activity, at my work, with my city recreation center's after school program. I explained the project to the kiddies, armed them with flashlights, and we were ready to experiment.

Prior to turning out the lights, I placed my camera on a tripod, pre focused on the kids, set my aperture to f/5.6, and the shutter on bulb.

Then, turning out the lights (after the kids stopped screaming) I would have them go through different movements holding the flashlights.

For example: I had several of them sit in a circle and pass the flashlight around the circle a few times. For the next shot I had one of the kids take a flash light in each hand and do jumping jacks and swing their arms in circles with the lights.

During the shoot I would vary my exposure time from 1 or 2 seconds up to 5-8 seconds (since, using film, I was not certain what I was getting). In addition I took multiple shots of each activity, bracketing the exposure times and aperture setting, to make certain I had something worth showing the kids.

Furthermore, since the results took several days to get back the kids, for the most part, had lost interest in the project during the lapse. However, once they DID see the results they were impressed and thought it was a "cool" activity.

More, on different techniques, coming to a darkroom near you soon.