We’re running a bit low on photos, so if you have good ones, send them in.
Today’s batch comes from our most regular regular, Dr. Mark Sturtevant, but with an unusual theme. Mark’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
And now for something completely different. Over the past few years, I have been exploring a type of photography called light painting. This term can refer to different kinds of artistic photography, but the one I practice involves taking multiple long exposures of a still-life scene illuminated only by a flashlight. The images are then imported into a photo editing program and blended together using digital paintbrushes. This technique can produce a single image with dramatic lighting effects that would be impossible to achieve in a single shot. While the process requires patience and basic familiarity with image editing software, I believe only minimal artistic skills are necessary. Anyone can do this!
In this small set of pictures, I showcase some of my light painting still-life projects. Since they incorporate natural and scientific objects, they may align with Readers’ Wildlife Photos in a broad sense.
The first images illustrate the initial steps of the light painting process. It begins by arranging a still-life scene in front of a camera on a tripod. I always take a few bright-field shots like this first picture. While a preliminary image like this may appear quite ordinary, and the surroundings can be cluttered, this step is useful in order to figure out the composition. The shells in this picture are part of my large collection of marine and freshwater specimens.
Next, the camera is set for a long exposure (typically 15-20 seconds). After turning off the room lights, I work in total darkness while “painting” over a portion of the scene with a small flashlight. After the shutter closes, I repeat the process with another long exposure, illuminating a different part of the scene. It’s essential to avoid moving the camera between exposures, and it is essential to keep the flashlight moving in order to create soft shadows. Here are two examples of such images, taken straight out of the camera.
This sequence is repeated several more times. In this case, I took approximately two dozen pictures, though I likely didn’t use all of them in the final picture.
The next step involves loading the images into a photo editing program and selectively blending them together. While many photographers use Photoshop for this, I prefer GIMP, which is a free alternative to Photoshop. I do nearly all of my photo editing in GIMP. The images are stacked as layers, one on top of the other, so that each picture is perfectly aligned. This alignment is why it’s crucial to keep everything stationary during the photography process.
A layer mask filter is applied to the top layer, and this allows me to use a digital paintbrush to selectively make parts of the top image transparent to reveal the corresponding areas of the image beneath it. This technique is non-destructive, meaning the pixels in the top image remain intact and can easily be restored if needed.
Once I’m satisfied with how the first two images are blended, I merge them into a single picture layer. I repeat this process for each subsequent layer until the final composition is complete.
And with that, here is the finished image of the seashells.
Next, I’d like to share a few more light painting projects. This is a human skull that I’ve had most of my life and it is called “Uncle Herbert.” Based on the shape of the eye sockets and other details, I consider Uncle Herbert was a male, though I could be mistaken. This was my very first light painting, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the process was!
In this final scene, Uncle Herbert is used again alongside objects related to “Human Biology,” which is what I call this picture. The old microscope belonged to my father, and the human vertebra in the foreground is a well-worn teaching specimen I purchased long ago.
For anyone interested in trying out this kind of photography, here is a tutorial about using a flashlight. (Click on “Watch on YouTube”).
And here is a tutorial on using layer masks in Gimp. Photoshop would be very much the same, and I expect there are other photo editing programs.
Finally, one can find a couple more of my light painting photos here, including a very complicated one that almost broke me.
Great results!
Creepy! Great photos.
That’s a cool technique!
Really unusual and beautiful, thanks for sharing these creative efforts.
Out of necessity I have had to use light painting with a UV flashlight to capture visible fluorescence of small “landscapes” that can’t be reasonably lit with a single UV source. It is fun! I found that long-exposure noise reduction was very helpful, and I make multiple exposures, each as short as possible while still allowing time for light-painting some region of the object. Too long exposure allows noise to accumulate.
That would be fun. I could see how one could do that in multiple exposures, with each turning out a bit different, and then you could use this layer mask technique to selectively blend the pictures to bring out the best of each.
I thought long exposures would reduce sensor noise, but I guess I don’t know.
You have a point there. Certainly long exposure averages out the noise. But the average brightness of the dark areas still increases with exposure time. To fix that, you can subtract a “dark frame” taken through a capped lens, like we do in astrophotography. This is part of what in-camera long-exposure noise reduction does too.
Very interesting technique, with great results. Good to know about GIMP.
Yes, thank you for an interesting lesson and examples!
Well done, Mark. It’s hard to do this well.