While getting used to my shiny Canon 450d, I have been using flickr a whole lot more and have found inspiration within the realms of light painting!

For those of you that don’t know, ‘Light painting’ usually involves fairly long exposures and a light source. From what you generally see on flickr, there’s 2 main types – static lighting that lights up a scene with funky colours or ‘drawing’ with a light source.

Here’s an example of painting a scene with a light source and ‘gels’.

The Throne Room by JohnnyBlough

Generally these sort of photos are done with a flash or ‘strobe’ and using different colour ‘gels’ in front of the flash. You use a long exposure and light up different parts of your subject to build up the end result.

I’ve experimented a bit with a few different light sources and here are some of the results… 

These first two are of a lightning bulb, one with me touching the side of the bulb to attract the strands of lightning to one spot and one with a bit of foil on the top to keep the strand in one place constantly.

Blue Touch by me

Match Stick Lightning by me

This one below is using a light intended to sit in the bath and light it up! Random I know but I was going through firebox.com looking for interesting light sources.

Technicolour Spiral by me

Photographing my guitars is so much fun and I get to play with my camera too! This one is now my desktop!

I was pretty surprised at the quality of shot I could get out of my compact (Nikon S3) camera for this, it’d be quality to play with a digital SLR one day I reckon!

I was avoiding revision and was playing about with myspace themes and wanted something black as a background so I just inverted the colour on the pencil drawing – its pretty effective I thought!

I also tried it on an old doodle that I had considered as a tattoo here: