Flowers

Flowers

Flowers are excellent subjects to Light Paint as you can vary the strength of the lighting for the different colours and of course direct the light from different directions to bring out the textures. Hover over the images to see the painted versions (it can take a few ticks to load the first time).

This example, of a couple of lilies and some roses, is from a single 6 second exposure quickly moving a small LED panel around to light the flowers to bring out the textures. This mode of Light Painting can be a bit of a hit and miss affair as one is quickly varying the intensity and direction in a single short take and it is more difficult to predict the result compared to the multiple shot technique. One needs to plan and practice the movements before doing it for real.

I did this 5 times and am very pleased with the results, especially this one. It really helped taking 'normal' Light Painting shots in preparing me for this 'real-time' painting. The final image is, of course, post-processed to realise my interpretation of the subject.

Just look at the detail that Light Painting can reveal in this crop - I never thought that I would be able to take picture as good as this, I just love the details and rendition.

Here are some church flowers.
The original non-flash exposure is very flat and has bright windows behind the arrangement to distract one. The church had awful neon street lights which completely ruins colour.

Now compare the normal off camera flash with a light painting using the flash gun but allowing the camera to control it's power automatically. So all I had to do was position it to get the required lighting effect.

I took 6 shots from different directions which I combined so that all the leaves where lit and the texture of each flower was revealed.