Creative Light Painting Basics
Light painting can be a fun and creative way to show off your subject. It can sound intimidating at first, but light painting is quite simple. When light painting, the shutter speed on your camera needs to be long so you can capture the light you shine on your subject. With long shutter speeds comes the need for a tripod to ensure your camera doesn’t move during the shot and a high aperture to compensate for all the light a long shutter speed will capture. You’ll start out in auto focus, with a light shining on your subject, to enable you to focus on the spot you want, and then switch to manual focus to allow you to start the picture in the dark. On auto focus you won’t be able to take a picture unless you do this when it is as dark as you need it to be for these types of shots.
Light Painting – Bokeh
This image is a little different than the rest. When shooting with such a high aperture, everything should be in focus. So why is it that in the picture below, the back bottles are blurry? This is because I did something called faux bokeh. I set up my shot, started taking the picture and I lit up the front bottle only. Then I turned the light off and threw my lens out of focus. Then I lit up the back bottles, being careful to not light the front one so it stayed in focus.
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