January 2013

I signed up for the weekly photo challenge with the intention of pushing myself to try some new photography techniques, and something I’ve wanted to experiment with for a while, but haven’t made time for to date is…’painting with light’.

Having read a couple of articles previously, I’d satisfied myself that it was just a matter of setting up the shot, switching off the lights and waving around a torch for a few seconds.  This wasn’t the case of course!  I quickly found out that neither my hiking headlamp nor our sturdy Maglite, would give the desired results.  So a little frustrated, but nevertheless determined to make this work (it is a “challenge” after all)…a late night trip to the local drug store for an $8 LED torch, and a whole lot of trial and error later on the “waving around” front, yielded the images below.

I find the results quite pleasing, and I like the fact that you can create a very different look for an image by simply changing the ‘white balance’ settings in post processing.  My personal favourites are the black & white conversions…what are yours?

(click on image to enlarge and scroll through)