Light Painting/Zany Antics in the Dark

Light Painting/Zany Antics in the Dark

I’ve been looking forward to doing this all week. I tried it once before with some success but I wanted to try to improve on the last set of results.

I put the camera on manual and set the shutter speed to 50s and the aperture to the smallest possible, f22. The ISO doesn’t need to be high so I left it at 200. The camera lies on its back on the garage floor and a penlight torch is suspended above it. It takes quite a bit of trial and error to get the relationship between the torch and the camera right but once that’s done it’s time to begin.
The shutter is on 12s timer so that I can autofocus the camera on the still torch, set the torch moving and get to the light switch to turn off the lights.

Every image is different depending on how you set the torch moving. In this shot the torch started in quite large circles. It always ends up with a figure of eight shape in the middle because the torch eventually settles to its own rhythm.