Painting with light 9th October 2012

So, when I should have been doing homework for my HNC course, my wife and I had a go at ‘painting with light’.  I had seen some examples when we looked at long shutter speeds at college.  It was really good fun and i’m really pleased with the results.  I set my camera up on a tripod, set it to Manual, F11 (this is the smallest aperture that I could match with my flash), 100iso then varied shutter speeds between 10 and 30 seconds.  We used the dining room as the stage and made it as dark as possible.  While the camera shutter is open we ‘painted’ with a torch.  For an extra twist is was then possible, using a rear curtain sync flash (flash fires as the end of the exposure)  it was possible to include a mixture of ‘light painting’ and people posing.  I really liked the ones that reflected off the floor, it gave depth the the images.  I’d be interested to try again, but with some more reflective items in the shot.