A few years ago, I was introduced to the work of Jeff Newsom, a portrait and wedding photographer out of Southern California. One of the aspects of his work that really struck me was how incredible his night portraits are. Typically, night is a tough time for photographers because, you know, light is kind of important to photography (from Greek, meaning “writing with light”). The kinds of things Jeff does with his wedding couples and portrait subjects amazes me. Here’s the post that really got my attention. I’ll hang on a second until you get back. In particular, check out the last shot of the post.

The way he combines the light trails of light painting with traditional (I should have put that in quotes) portraiture astounds me. Light painting is pretty darn cool to begin with, but when you mix that with people, it starts to get downright epic.

So, on Saturday, I thought I’d give it a try. A handful of photographers and I got together in Wamego to check out the 4th of July carnival and see what sort of trouble we could get ourselves into. It seemed like exactly the kind of crowd to try out light painting with.

I knew the basic principles: Put your camera on a tripod. Use a slow shutter speed, a low ISO, and a small aperture. Use a hand-held light-emitting device to either create trails of light or to illuminate the subject.

What I didn’t know was how tricky it was, exactly, to get things to work out the way you want them to.

And so, I present to you, what I learned about how not to paint with light.

First, make sure your light is bright enough.

Here, my iPod Touch, which is pretty darn bright in a dark room, wasn’t nearly bright enough to leave a light trail.

Second, to leave a thick trail, the light must be not only bright, but large.

Here, I was using the super bright LED flash on my friend’s smartphone. It left a great, crisp, bright trail, but wasn’t nearly as big as I was looking for.

That’s about the time we realized that my friend Terry, who had lent me his phone, had also brought what he called a “very cheap ring light,” which consisted of 20 or so super bright LEDs arranged in a ring that attaches to the front of the camera’s lens. It has its own battery pack, so they’re really bright and can stay on easily for a long time.

Perfect.

Which leads to my third lesson learned: Don’t wave your super bright light in front of where your face will be, or else your face won’t be there at the end.

The green lights in this came from the ring light’s battery pack indicator lights. I really love how each light on the ring light leaves its own trail, which crosses and twists around the trails left by the other lights. There’s such depth and texture to it!

So, the next thing we realized was that, no matter how bright the flash on the subject is, if you’re not standing there for the whole exposure, you’re going to appear as a ghost because the background will already have been partially exposed. You have to have the subject stand in place the whole time the shutter is open.

For this one, I opened the shutter, walked out to our straw spot, triggered the flash, and walked out of the frame. Notice how I’m nearly transparent? That’s because when I wasn’t there, the floodlights for the basketball court continued to illuminate the background and expose the sensor.

So, that meant we needed someone other than the photographer to be the subject. For that, we coerced forced gently persuaded Julie, one of the photographers who came out for the fun, to stand in as our subject.

For this frame, I attempted to draw angel wings and a halo around her. Besides the fact that I drew the wings upside down, I also learned that you have to get out of the frame before you trigger the flash on the subject.

Once we figured all that out, good things started happening. The good stuff is right after the jump. Continue reading…