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Class Introduction: What is Light Painting?

Lesson 1 from: FAST CLASS: Light Painting

Tim Cooper

Class Introduction: What is Light Painting?

Lesson 1 from: FAST CLASS: Light Painting

Tim Cooper

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Lesson Info

1. Class Introduction: What is Light Painting?

Lesson Info

Class Introduction: What is Light Painting?

I'm here tonight to tell you about light painting. Uh, what we're gonna cover today is why you want a light paint. How you're gonna light paint. We're gonna talk about things like photographing in the dark, setting up your camera proper camera considerations, beam angle, beam with flashlights, everything from a to Z ending, of course, with one of the most important parts, which is processing your images after the fact in both light room and photo shop. So first question is, what is light painting? What is late painting all about? Well, late painting and short. Really, you guys is just taking a dark scene and adding light. So what we're gonna do is we're going to start off with a night scene completely dark. Could be outside, could be indoors. Could be your bathroom. Could be a national park. Could be a garden and come up with our initial ambient exposure and then simply learn how to add in light to the photograph. Now, light painting is ah, I think it's a pretty awesome technique. You ...

get this sort of glow to your images, you get this look that you just can't get any other way. Now you may look at this and say, Oh, gosh, you know, this is gonna be really hard, but it really isn't that bad. It's really easy once you learn a few tricks. Which, of course, we'll tell you about today. Um and of course, practice a little bit of practices. Well, so the really neat thing I think about this is that modern digital cameras really give us a big advantage. Uh, I started off doing this in film many years ago, and it was so much harder toe learn. This process was so much more try on air and waiting for the result. But with modern digital cameras, we can see this stuff right away. So we're able to really advance much quicker then we were ever able to before. So all in all, light painting is a fascinating mix of painting and photography. I think one of the things that I like about it most is that we're going beyond the realm of just normal photography where we're seeing a subject or perhaps building a scene and simply taking the picture. What we're doing here is we're truly creating the light. Uh, it's like a master studio photographer but working outside, we bring the light, whether it be a flash or whether it be a flashlight and we're going to start creating are masterpieces. So let's talk a little bit about why you would want to paint with light. Um, I've personally love painting with light simply because of the results. They just glow. You can get a look to your photographs with one single flashlight. That would be impossible to replicate with many different lights, or at least very, very difficult. So in an example like this, this is really super flat light. This might be something. Let's say you had an on camera flash. I took a picture. Uh, this is what you get. It's really super flat, very un interesting. But, ah, wander around that scene and illuminated with one single flashlight and things drastically change. You can see we're getting a lot more dimension we're getting. We're getting texture down here in the bottom. Um, I'm able to illuminate just solely the chair. I'm able to diminish the lighter, pull the light back down in the background, so it's not so brilliant. Lots of control. So we're trying to get away from that sort of straight on flash. Look, which is exactly what I've done here. Now look at the difference between this slide. First of all, notice the color. This kind of white, um, white light, rather, uh And then check out that just a little bit more depth, A little bit more intensity, a little bit more interest. So in the next lesson, what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about basic camera considerations. How do you want to set up your camera?

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Tim's Gear Guide
Tim's Lightroom Presets

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