A few people said they were interested in the technique I used for my 'Painting with light' photo in Dgrin Challenge 36. If you have any questions, you can find me here at Digital Grin.


-- Dave Parry

What you will need...

- Torch, I used a small MagLite
- Paintbrush
- Roll of Aluminium foil

-Tripod mounted camera (of course)
- Wired remote (optional)

Firstly, you need to make a snoot out of aluminium foil to attach to the end of the MagLite, so that you are able to control of the direction and spread of the light. Mine looked something like this...

Note: I use some electrical tape, to stop light coming through the gap in the join.

To make my life a bit easier, I attached my wired remote to the paintbrush as pictured here...

With my camera set to manual, F/8, 5 secs and focused to infinity.

I held the torch and the paintbrush together as shown here. Pressed the shutter button. Held the MagLite still for about 1 sec, and then moved it away from the paintbrush as shown.

This photo is the one I decided I was happy with..

However, I felt the lines with too uniform, so I found another exposure and added it as an 'overlay' layer to the original. This produced a more random light stream as pictured here.

I then used a curves adjustment in Photoshop to change the color of the light to purple, and did some other clean up work. To produce the final result...

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