I teach digital imaging at HACC, and one of the projects I assign is a low-light/night photography series. The assignment usually yields some pretty interesting stuff.

I give a brief presentation on abstract photography beforehand, where I mention painting with light, but I never actively tried it (if you’re not familiar with what this is, it’s basically doing a long exposure and taking a light source, such as a flashlight, and playing around). This semester, one of my students expressed their interest in this technique, and it got me wondering how difficult it is to not appear in the photo. Since I couldn’t remember ever seeing light grafitti on Beyond Second, and I figured it was about time to post something, too.

As I prefer to teach with my own examples (and not stock photography), I went out the other night and did some shooting. My wife noted that it was the first time in ages I’d done so . . .

I was trying to get a skyline shot for a site design. I never used it in the design, but I started playing around with 20-30 second exposures.

You can see my head above the statue. I tried to work quickly, as I didn’t want to wake the guy snoring on the nearby bench.

I think it’s good practice to take a standard exposure of the subject matter, just in case you want to do tonal mapping to the image. I tried doing this to eliminate the ghosting in the above shot, but in this case, merging the two yielded too clean a result for my taste.

It’s pretty addictive, and one soon finds themselves wanting to experiment with different colors, patterns, etc. I’ll probably go out and do this again at some point, and I’m wondering if I’ll ever see someone doing the same at 2 a.m.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 3:16 pm and is filed under photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.