Many moons ago Mie and I were lucky enough to have portraits made by Julian Cash of SuperSnail.com using a painting-with-light technique he had been working on. For this week's project I tried using the same technique. It involves setting the camera on a tripod in a dark room, then opening the shutter for a long period of time as you use various lights to draw over the scene.
I talked Mie into being my model, which wasn't too hard, and then talked her into letting me post them on the Internet, which was somewhat difficult. Here's some, the rest are in my Painting With Light Flickr set.
My two light sources were a glowing pig and a small flashlight (usually with my finger covering the bulb):
Very cool. Reminds me of the Grifters album cover:
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:jvfuxqyhldte
and the Picasso pic:
http://www.vpphotogallery.com/photog_mili_picasso.htm
so how do you leave the shutter open long enough to get all the light movement, but Mie is not blurred?
Posted by: Paul | 2008.01.28 at 10:13 AM
It varied but most shots were either 13 seconds or 30 seconds on a timer. There's another mode where the shutter stays open as long as you push the button, but it would have taken a third person (or I think I could buy a remote switch) to take advantage of that.
I didn't mess much with the ISO and other settings. I'd like to experiment more with that and other low-lumens light sources.
Posted by: dav | 2008.01.28 at 10:24 AM