POV: Painting With Light Photography

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy | All Rights Reserved

Under the lockdown, and with limited opportunities to immerse myself in street photography (and certainly none whatsoever for travel), I've looked for other ideas to exercise my shutter finger. There's a ton of YouTube videos that offer creative ideas; some of which are truly interesting.

One of those ideas is what is called "painting with light photography"...which in its simplest form is nothing more than using a flashlight to light the object that you want to “paint”. The flashlight can be like a brush that smears the light on that object, or used to light a specific area/spot on the object. 

The latter is the technique I used for both examples.

The keys to successful results are a dark room, a tripod, one or two flashlights...and patient experimenting. I used a Leica M9 on manual, using the self-timer and a longish shutter speed. While the shutter opens, I illuminated the Buddhas for as long as it was open.

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy | All Rights Reserved

I tried on other Buddhas that are monochromatic, and found that those with colors (especially red or gold) looked much better because the light enhanced the contrast between the colored areas and surrounding darkness.

For the upper frame, I used Leica M9 and a Voigtlander 40mm at 1/15th, 400 iso and opened at f1.6. For the lower frame, I used the same hardware but the lens wide open at f1.4.

I then used ON1 software to warm up the two frames, as the beam from flashlight is too blue for my liking.