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I thought I'd try some Light Painting of a different nature and I'd be interested in any thoughts or suggestions...


Normally I'm involved with light painting of large scale landscape type scenes but in this instance I wanted to try a more delicate touch on some near macro subjects.

The Brush


So armed with just a single small LED torch with some black gaffer tape wrapped around the head to allow me to more finely control the light and limit any spill I set about light painting my subjects.

Over a few days I'd collected some typically Australian - for want of a better word - "nuts" - from my local area. I setup two tripods in a darkened room at home - one with my camera with the trusty Tamron 90mm macro lens and the other with my new Wimberly Plamp to hold my subjects both still and in the position I wanted them so I could paint them.

I was aiming to use exposures of around one to two minutes to give myself enough time to slowly paint my subjects with light whilst choosing an aperture appropriate for the depth of field I wanted.

My first results...

Whirly Birds on Green


Mr Gumnut


Banksia Man

I'm liking the potential here Rodney...

The Gum Nut and Banksia are done well... the other two look to have too many shadows in the wrong places to my eye.
The Gum Nut has also retained a nice dimension that you've lost in the Banksia.

Are you using some fancy led torch for this or a $2 job?
I assume your flagging the subject off with some black card or material?

Are your family starting to worry about this habit of locking yourself into a pitch dark room for long periods?

Just wondering

I quite like them. They are very unusual.

Beautiful, stunning, crafted, award winning, I guess I really like these photos

not sure Rodney, nothing jumps out at me with a wow, maybe it's the black BG, maybe it's the educational book photo look... i think i prefer nuts with nicely coloured bokeh BG.

I quite like the maple in green Rodney.
Nice concept

biggerry wrote:maybe it's the educational book photo look...

Nothing wrong with that. There's often a time when you need to have that separation of subject from its background, and what Rodney has done here is ideal for that.

I think that these are very saleable images, and especially so if properly classified.

Light painting is a useful technique for many subjects and is particularly good for large, architectural interiors such as churches and halls etc. Using a hand held spotlight the photographer 'paints' the interior with spills of overlapping light. The results are high detail, shadowless and sometimes spectacular. Using the technique on small objects can also be very useful as the above images show. I used to challenge my students to go out and paint something huge, like a railway station or a large bridge, and they sometimes came back with the most wonderful images. The technique is also useful for photographing large accident scenes at night such as multiple truck collisions etc. It can also be carried out using a hand fire flashgun.
Nice work Rodney.