Light Painting Photography

Last week, I went up to the Blue Ridge Parkway with my dad to do some astrophotography. Unfortunately, we got TOO elevated which put us in the dead center of a cloud, blocking out all of the sky. However, it was high enough up that there was minimal light pollution, which makes for some good long-exposure shots! Instead of doing astrophotography, I decided to try out light painting photography for the first time. Light painting is basically where you set you camera to a long exposure (I used 30 secs) and you wave light around in front of the camera to make patterns and trails of light. Since it is so dark and you are constantly moving, the camera only catches the light and whatever the light illuminates. In the picture below, I used the highest f-stop my lens would allow (12-22mm ultrawide), an f4 aperture. I set my exposure for 30 seconds and got my dad to stand still for that time (which was quite difficult considering it was literally 12 degrees up there). I waved the light around and this came out.

Ghost Town

This photo is a composition of seven different photos, stacked using Adobe After Effects. I shot at f4 with a 1/10 second exposure using my wide angle lens at 12mm.

Gram and I were in the river arts district a few weeks ago trying to find something to shoot. We couldn't find much, and so on our way home, we saw an interesting bridge with a place to sit in between the two lanes. I shot about 10 photos in a row with continuous shooting mode on, and stacked the photos in After Effects. What I originally intended on happening was for the photos to look normal and just be stacked, but what happened is that the light apparently combined and created extreme highlights. I think that this looks really neat but I needed to crop out half the photo because the rest of it is just white. It looks like there are four clones of Gram and I like how everything is just a little transparent, the car being the most. It's a photo that is unique to my typical styles and I really enjoyed having this produced!

P.S. I edited very minimally beside lowering the exposure just a bit (the brightness) and adding some grain to create more texture in the spaces that are just white.