Further Light Painting Photography

In response to the critique of my video, I decided to tweak my Narrative film to include a few more instances of light painting. This would keep the continuity throughout the film and give me more opportunity to refine these skills.

Rosie and I worked together on this project. She was interested in experimenting with light painting techniques, so we set up in a dark room with printed images that we wanted to recreate. Our goal was to use a torchlight to follow the paths of the images, but we experimented using different lights to try them out.

We experimented with phone lights and torches, but they were either too bright or too big for the size we were working at. We played around with ISO and shutter speed settings, figuring out which combination of settings would work best. We settled on 100 ISO to counteract the direct light with long shutter speeds of 30 seconds for plenty of time to trace the images. We then collected small LED lights for another attempt at a later date.

On our second attempt, we taped small LED battery-operated lights to a stick. This allowed us to trace around the images on the floor, resulting in more even lighting. We made multiple attempts for each image, enabling us to combine the best parts of each attempt.

I imported the RAW images into Lightroom and adjusted the light and color settings to create a white light effect, and exported as JPEGs. After that, I used Photoshop to layer the best parts of the images and made touch-ups using the eraser, paintbrush, and heal tools.

Next, I added the following elements to my Premiere Pro file for my narrative film. I adjusted the positioning, scale, and blend mode to match the original film. I replaced the silhouetted dogs with light-painted versions and added some human figures. Lastly, I included transitions before rendering and exporting the video.

Adding these additional light painting images made my story more consistent throughout. I enjoyed the process immensely and learned new ways to paint with light. I look forward to doing this again in the future. Additionally, I have learned a range of new skills through Premiere Pro and refined my Photoshop and Lightroom techniques.