Last night my friends Ashlee and Dustin and I decided to go try our luck at a technique called light painting. What this is is taking several different shots of the same subject, but in each shot lighting up a small section of the subject with a light. Then you take each of these images and merge them together in Photoshop. It took us roughly two hours to get all the pieces that we needed. My camera settings were f/ 8.0, ISO 100, with a ten-second exposure. In Photoshop, I brought in the different images and then masked out the parts that I wanted. Once I had that all done, I put the image through Camera RAW to boost the colors, vibrance and clarity.
There are a couple of different ways to do light paining. The technique we used was following
Eric Curry's amazing example. Another technique is demonstrated by
Dave Black, who only does one shot in a 20-30 second exposure. He doesn't light the whole subject, but instead leaves part of the subject dark to add more character and texture. I'm hoping to try out his style soon.
