After several years acting as a mirror address for this site, LightPainting.org has now been re-launched as a community based site dedicated to light painting. Please go take a look and sign up if you’re interested in light painted photography.
If you want to have a go at light painting but don’t have a lot of high-end equipment, have a look at the Light Painting with Basic Equipment article in the Techniques section. It covers basic light painting using a compact camera and a cheap plastic tripod.
Light Painting with Basic Equipment
I shot Kirsty recently using glowsticks and glow-bracelets to create swirls of light. All you have to do is break the glass phial inside them to set them aglow. With the glowsticks that’s quite easy – just snap them – but with the bracelets they’re just too small and so you have to thump the little plastic beads with something and hope they don’t burst open. We got about half of them glowing, which was enough.
Very occasionally I get the chance to shoot an image that has been rattling around in the dark recesses of my brain for ages. In this case I really wanted to take a long-exposure shot of a pole-dancer spinning round a pole while covered in lights that would leave a trail in the air as she moved. The only problems were that I didn’t know any poledancers and I didn’t have access to a pole.
When I first got hold of some electroluminescent wire I wanted to use it for a guitar shot. It took me a while to get around to it, and when I did I discovered that stringing a guitar with EL wire isn’t really that easy. Who would have guessed. Once it was ready Fuchsia played it for me and Sian did the makeup.
I went on a trip up to Perth last weekend to work with the fabulously talented Chrissie Red. She hardly got cramp at all, despite me posing her in in some particularly awkward locations, and she was somewhat disappointed that I only fell over once and she missed it, so had one less opportunity to laugh at my antics.
