Painting with Light

Our assignment was to take flash lights into the darkroom and use a long shutter speed to capture the path of the lights as we drew with them. I first thought this would be easy, but I was definitely wrong! Not only is the darkroom super creepy when you are alone and its totally dark, but its hard to know where to paint with light to get the exact picture you want. But, I did manage to get an end result I am pleased with.

30 second shutter speed, aperture 16

Camera 204 (Nikon D3100), zoom lens.

I liked the concept of incorporating a person with the light elements, because I thought it was more interesting than just a person or a light drawing alone. I then noticed how when you shone a white flash light on people and drew around them it kind of looked like they were glowing. This made me think of angels, so I tried drawing wings and a halo around Sophia. I really liked the effect! Then I tried doing double exposures of people, and thought that it was quite cool how it made people looked like ghosts. so for my photo I combined the two, to make a ghost angel behind a sad-looking girl. I think this photo looks very cool, and I like how dark and simple the background is. This shot took three days of experimentation to get, but I think it was definitely worth it.

Using the angel wings and halo, I tried to make a supernatural side to my photo. I wanted the mythical side because I wanted to create a feeling of wonder in my viewers. I wanted to make the viewers feel this sense of wonder because this is how I feel about light photography. You can use it to alter the reality of your photo and make anything real. Light photography makes me feel like there could be angels or fairies or a number of impossible things, because we can make these impossible things real through photos. I tried to make the viewer feel this by making an angel come out of the darkness, as if she was always there but you have to look harder to see her.

All the shots I tried to take were inspired by the works of The Light Junkies. Check them out!  This particular shot was inspired by their shots where they outlined a person or added elements to them and their surroundings, but I also attempted thinks like the light globes, the flower drawings, and the river-like streams of light.