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Raffi
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Light Painting

On thursday I had a meeting with some guys who do PR for Samsung.  They told me about a project they did a few months ago here in HK focused on 'Light Painting'.  For those who don't know what Light Painting is, its defined as:

Light painting, also known as  light drawing or  light graffiti is a  photographic technique in which  exposures are made usually at night or in a darkened room by moving a hand-held light source or by moving the  camera. In many cases the light source itself does not have to appear in the image. The term light painting also encompasses images lit from outside the frame with hand-held light sources. Today I went for a REALLY long bike ride (pics coming eventually), it was already dark before I finished,  I stopped for a rest and to take a night scenery photo.  Since I had my bike light with me, I decided to try my hand at some Light Painting too.  :-PIts harder than you think... cause you're basically 'writing' in mid air with nothing.  It took me a LOT of tries to get anything legible:  not only are you writing in mid air with a flashlight, you also have to write backwards! :-PMy camera has a max of 15 seconds on a long exposure,  which sounds like a long time, but trust me, its not!  This is what happens if you're too slow: doh, only got half-way through the H... :-Pok, my handwriting needs a bit of work. :-Pi tried another angle to get a wider view.and just for fun, i rode around in circles on my bicycle waving the light around to see what it'd look like. this one i cheated, I wrote it 'forwards' and then flipped the picture so its readable.I also did a special one for my friend's birthday.  Do you know how hard it is to write 'Birthday' with a flashlight?! :-P

over 15 years ago 0 likes  35 comments  0 shares
Missyellow
amazing!!
over 15 years ago
Photo 43244
dude this is cool! we should all go out and do this one night! What camera are you using????
over 15 years ago
Photo 38281
man this is really cool stuff. were you alone? im sure if there were ppl standing by watching they would all be thinking like whatin the world is that gwailo doing? lol
over 15 years ago
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simon - just my plain old Canon IXUS. I put it on top of one of those pay binocular things they have mounted on the water front. sure, let's do it. (but be warned, it too a LOT of tries to get something legible!) :-P
over 15 years ago
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Quinn - thankfully not a lot of people, this is kind of a remote area between Shatin and Taipo, but yes, there were people walking by looking...
over 15 years ago
Photo 22991
nice
over 15 years ago
Wudi
nice ...
over 15 years ago
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I think so too!
over 15 years ago
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peachey - not necessarily. i just left my camera on top of something stationary, you can of course move the camera too, it will make the background blurry though (which may be an intentional addition)
over 15 years ago
Photo 469373
This is amazing!!
over 15 years ago
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ok, based on the feedback so far - we definitely got to organize a light painting party sometime soon. ;-)
over 15 years ago
Img 4957
this one is nice!! I've never done this before..
over 15 years ago
Photo 37580
My name would be hard, doing backwards S's is tough hehe.
over 15 years ago
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freestylechick - you need to put your camera on something stationary, then put it manual mode and make the exposure time extremely long (like 10 seconds). you have to do it at night otherwise the pic will be too bright. :-P
over 15 years ago
Photo 303052
You should check out Pika Pika's video with light painting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zp-65Lwmh8 Gorgeous stop motion work - 16,362 photos taken over 73 hours/10 shooting days in 2C weather....
over 15 years ago
Photo 33405
Some friends and I tried 'light painting' by drawing shapes but it looks cooler if you can write words. I should try writing my next time, it's nice and short. hehe
over 15 years ago
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rockginger - wow, thats pretty freaky. how the heck did they make it ? was it all real light painting? they must have used some kind of fixtures to get each frame to line up with the previous and next ones..
over 15 years ago
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ivy - ha, i was thinking the opposite. I really only did one that was not writing, i thought i should try more of that next time. I thought interacting with some of the objects in the picture would be cool (like trace around the light poles, benches, etc).
over 15 years ago
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bacca - thanks! you put your camera on manual mode and set the shutter time to be long exposure (10+ seconds) and then use a flash light to write. its hard! ;-)
over 15 years ago
Photo 441223
HEY YOU DID THAT FOR MY BIRTHDAY!!!! WOOOOHOOOO I feel super special now having read how hard that is to do!
about 15 years ago

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I work at alivenotdead.com. Please check out my blogs and leave a comment!

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Languages Spoken
English,Armenian,Japanese,Mandarin
Location (City, Country)
Hong Kong
Gender
Male
Member Since
April 13, 2007