How to Paint with Light - A Photography Technique
Hello, this technique will show you how to light a bottle in a more creative way. We’re always looking for different ideas to do at home, and this one is a really simple one and you need the minimum of equipment. As you can see here, I’ve placed a bottle, glass bottle on a background which is just a piece of cloth. Can be any color you like, I’m gonna use green, because it’s similar to the bottle. And what we’re gonna do is use a maglight style torch, which you can buy from any hardware store, with a piece of card wrapped around it, with a small hole at the front. So it’s cone shaped, it’s very crudely attach, but it doesn’t matter. The cone at the front and the hole will gonna paint around the bottle to create like an outline of it. That’s like painting with light. The camera is, can be any model you like, this one is a Samsung GX10 which is a digital auto focus SLR. I focused manually on the bottle and I’ve set the exposure to manual, because if it’s on automatic, it’s not gonna see what we’re gonna be doing. So it’s on manual exposure, 30 seconds, shutter speed, which is a long time, use to make plenty of time to paint around the bottle. And I’ve got an aperture of 5.6. That’s as far as we go for the technical side, now let’s go to the practical side. Okay, we’re ready to go. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna hold the torch and I’m gonna move it around. This needs to be done in the dark, otherwise influencing lights will cause problems with the bottle, so. We’ll gonna switch the lights out now. Alright, the first thing to do is turn the torch on and focus the beam, this particular torch has, you can rotate it, and you can see you can get a sharper beam and now you’ll see why we need a cone, because the idea is to make a very small point light source rather than light spilling all over the place, so that’s ready. I’m gonna place it behind the bottle and then go to the camera and click. And as we click, we move up very slowly and very evenly and the difficulty here is keeping your hand steady. Not go steady as to them but, that’s not bad. And try to get as close to the shape of the bottle as you can, because the neater you are, the better it’s gonna look. And that’s it, that’s the outline of the bottle, move your torch away real quickly and light the camera, finish the exposure. In this case it didn’t go anywhere near 30 seconds, but it’s always better to be on the safe side.