Light painting Nathan – P365 Jul23

Nathan visited us again today, and again I had fun taking photos. We even tried some cool animated light painting, which you can see below:

This cool effect was inspired by a recent post on the Strobist blog, and like most readers of the blog, I've been itching to give the technique a try myself. It's pretty simple, and only a timid first attempt, but I'm pretty chuffed with how it turned out. I think there's great potential for cool, fun photos in the future!

Technical details:

• Remotely triggered 580EX on stand to the right, with barn door on one side to isolate subject from the background.
• Simple desk lamp on the left (my second flash doesn't seem to want to work wirelessly any more).
• 80cm silver reflector on stand at left at head hight.
• With the remotely triggered camera on "bulb" setting, immediately after the flash fired, an assistant turned off the desk lamp.
• I stepped in from out of frame with a red LED torch (set to the dimmest of it's variable settings) and traced Nathan four times with the torch, then for the second version I also did a simple zig-zag around him.
• Once that was done I closed the shutter, and repeated the process four more times for a total of five frames.
• The raws were processed in Lightroom and assembled into an animated gif in Image Ready.