Another Take on Light Painting
By Maileilani Kealoha-Carpino
11 Oct 2009
I've seen tutorials on Youtube, read "How To's" on the internet and in magazines about painting with lights. What is light painting?
Traditionally, light painting is done with a camera, a tripod, a light source (ex: LED light, Flashlight) and a dark room or alley. Using long camera exposures, you take your light source and in essence paint in the air with the light while the shutter is open. The end result is usually lines of light creating a pattern, picture or words. However, a drive home one night gave me a wonderful idea for another take on light painting. My equipment, in this experiment, would be a vehicle and driver, the highway, and my camera.
My experiment spanned a couple of evenings. The first evening, it was raining and visibility was low. I had just hand held the camera relatively still and experimented with different timed exposures and f-stops. I also had my camera lens focused on infinity and set it on manual focus so it would not try to refocus continuously. I instructed my driver, and husband, to maintain his speed, to stay in the same lane, and of course, to pay attention to the road! The rain, I thought would probably effect the look of the image in a negative way, but to my surprise it did effect it, but in a cool and interesting way! (See image: Inebriated) A few nights later it was clear and visibility was high. I found the opportunity to repeat the experiment. I set my camera as I had done previously. And started to snap away. This time I thought I'd try something different so I moved the camera around in circles and figure eights. These are some of the results of my fun experiment.
One Idea for Post Processing:
"Luminance"
Editing Software used: Adobe Photoshop Elements 7
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
First you open the light painting file that you would like to work with in Photoshop elements 7. The image should appear in the Palette Bin. Using elements 7 there are a couple of ways to copy a new layer of your image but for the sake of keeping it simple just right click on your image in the pallet bin and select "duplicate layer". Another workable layer should appear in your pallet bin (make sure that's the one that remains highlighted because that's the one that you are going to work with). Then you go to "Image" located in the toolbar at the top of the editor window. Under "Image" you want to go to "Rotate" and then select "Flip Layer Vertical". (Image>Rotate>Flip Layer Vertical) When you do this you should see that your original is still the same while the layer that you have highlighted has done just as it should have...flipped vertically. If it hasn't done that, then you've chosen the wrong thing, revert and repeat. You're early enough into it where it won't take you long to get back on track.
Anyway, next step. You want to go back up to the toolbar at the top of the editor and select "Image" again. This time you want to go to "Resize" and then "Canvas Size". (Image>Resize>Canvas Size). Canvas size increases the size of the canvas that you are working on rather than increasing the size of the image itself. First, you want to set your anchor. If you don't anchor your image then the program just assumes you want to expand your canvas in all directions and will just center your image and evenly distribute the added canvas around your image. In contrast, if you anchor your image it expands in a specific direction. The tool to anchor your image should look like a box with arrows all around it. The box represents your image/anchor and the arrows represent the direction in which the canvas will expand. To anchor your image, click on the arrow where you'd like your image to be anchored, in this case we want to double our image height, so I click on the arrow pointing down. The icon then should change to a box now with arrows pointing upward and to it's sides and none pointing down. Now you want to make sure the box that says "Relative" is NOT checked. When you go to resize your canvas, this involves math. For example, the original canvas size of my image is 19.133 x 12.733 inches or 4592 x 3056 pixels (width x height). I want to double the height of my canvas so I multiply the height by two. In my case it was 25.466 inches or 6101 pixels. Click "OK". You should get a blank space just above your image.
Next you want to use the move tool to pull the top layer into the blank space. It should fit perfectly...if you did the math correctly. Once you have it in there and matched up properly, then you right click on that layer and flatten the image. Repeat the process, but this time to modify it to expand width-wise.
Really, that process can be done as much as often as you want and works just as well with smoke photography. One thing to keep in mind is that the actual canvas size increases the file size as well. Depending on what you plan to do with the image you may have to resize it smaller.
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