Light Painting Photography

For this assignment, we were asked to experiment with light using photographic techniques and light trails to tell a story.

For me, painting with light was not the problem.  Telling a story was the problem.  We went snowboarding that day and my original plan was that my kiddos would carve down the mountain with an led light and then stop and pose for the pic.  Well, my phone thought it was MUCH TOO COLD at Brighton that night and would not cooperate.  So we came home and went to plan B.  We played around with several different apps for the iPhone and then settled on the one we started with, "Slow Shutter."

For anyone who wants to do this,  the best advice I can give you is to either use a tripod or stand very very still, aimed at the same thing.  If you click the shutter icon on the bottom left, put it on light trail, put light sensitivity a little less than half and put shutter speed all the way to the right (bulb).  Then click the camera, have your subject move the light around however you like.  Remember they can GO SLOWLY if you like, there is no problem with that (when we figured this out my daughter was relieved!).  I had her move from darkness INTO the light of the porch light and then freeze.  I let it go a second or two longer, then clicked on the square to stop.  Then if you hit edit and then freeze you can slide the bar closer to the right until you like that last image you see.  Click save when you like it but you can still play around a little after that and save different versions of the same photo.

For us, all efforts before using the porch light (we actually used a spot light on her face, too!) were great pictures of the light trails, but without being able to see the person that the story was about in the photo, there was no story.  These are two of my amazing cute kids, Boston and Holden.  They both prefer to shred, but ripping was fun too.