Trying Out Light Painting

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So after gathering some inspiration from other light painters that I’ve seen on the internet, I decided to try my hand at it myself. I liked the idea of being able to create complex light from a very simple source. It seemed simple enough at the start, but I soon learned that there is MUCH more to it than I’d first thought. It takes a lot of concentration, attention to detail and trial an error. I’m happy with my first attempt, but I definitely need much more practice with it. Read on for my take on light painting!

I bought a Cobra Handheld LED bar light off Amazon since it had a cigarette lighter charger included for outside shoots and seemed to have a nice flat beam. Once it arrived, I went out to the garage to give it a try.

Here’s a shot of the Cobra

At first, I was trying to do 30 sec exposures that encompassed the whole car in light, but it just wasn’t achieving that “slippery” look that I wanted. I adjusted to 10 sec exposures and would quickly “paint” one particular panel quickly, then shut off the light for the remainder of the exposure. I would do one panel at a time, checking after each shot. Definitely time consuming! After I got all the panels covered, I tried to get all the accents properly lit too – the door crease lines, hood lines etc. It was hard to keep track of all the pieces that I’d covered, and I ended up missing some (center of the hood, which I had to paint in, rear decklid among a few others).

Here’s a combined shot of all the exposures I used to create the final image.

Once in post, I combined all the collected images into one single layered image and began the meticulous process of masking off each individual layer. Labeling the layers (ie – “door” “hood” “door crease line” etc) helped the process out a lot.

After that, I did some minor sharpening and lens correction and reduced the saturation just a bit to get the look I wanted. For my first time light painting, I’m pretty happy with it. I need to work on getting the light more even on the panels, and my masking could use some work, but it will all get better with practice. Mainly, I was excited that I could get results like this in my boring, ugly garage!

The final image:

More to come on light painting. Please leave a comment if you have any questions!

Theo

**EDIT – 2/8/11 **

I tried the process again, but this time with a regular piece of printer paper taped around the light bar to diffuse it a bit. I also tried to light the car more naturally, with highlights and shadows to give it a less “CG-like” look. So far I like it a lot! The below picture is still a work in progress. The image is a composite of many that are straight out of the camera with no editing. It is a bit dark at the moment, but I will fix all that once I’m done piecing together the layers.

Thanks for checking it out!

Theo