Painting With Light

Background research:

Painting with light is a cool, fun way to use long exposure to capture some drawings. Using a small light source such as a torch or glow sticks, you can capture movement of the light direction as you draw with the light source. All you need is a dark room and a manual exposure camera and you're ready to go! 

source: tumblr

This is an example of what you can create with using a torch. Set your camera to a long exposure and the biggest aperture to let the least amount of light in (depending on how bright your light source is)

Contact sheets:

Additional pictures done at home:

This image was shot at f/8 at 30 secs. I like this image because beside it being fun, the concept of having images of you with lights drawn around you is not something you see everyday. It was actually hard doing these images because you can't see what you're drawing and you can only imagine how they would turn out. I think the light in the image is indeed rather bright and that's because we had to change the settings each time we used the glow sticks because they weren't that bright.

This image was taken on f/6.3 for 30 secs. This makes the lights rather muted compared to the previous image. However, i like how the colours are present clearly and you can see this blurry movement of the glow sticks. Perhaps increasing the aperture would make it a better picture as more light is let in.

Here's one I made at home by placing the camera on a table and setting up a timer. We decided to created a heartbeat with pulses however it turned out very deformed. This image is very different compared to the ones we took in college because this room was just as dark but using the settings at f/16 for 30 seconds, it looks a lot brighter. 

Another example taken at home. This image is very cool because the lights look very mystical and the hands gives it this evil element. This can be related to certain films and fairy tales of the evil witch where they also use this sort of image with lights. In this particular image, the lighting of the image is a lot darker than the previous one and the lights on the image is very bright. Settings were f/16 for 30 seconds just as before.