A Start to Finish Tutorial on Light Painting a Car

Light painting a car can be tricky to get right and difficult to know exactly what steps to take in camera. This video shows you the complete process, from garage space through to finished (and frankly brilliant) image.

One thing I've seldom written or spoken about on Fstoppers is that I am a petrolhead. My love for cars is something I certainly never grew out of and I'm as obsessed as I was at 6-years-old staring at a bright orange McLaren F1. I have done some photography work in the automotive sector, albeit primarily motorsport, and it's a deep and varied area. One technique I have only touched on once or twice is light painting a car.

For the uninitiated, light painting a car is when you use an LED to illuminate different parts of the car, taking long exposures of each. Once you've created the entire scene in its individual parts, you create a composite image in Lightroom and Photoshop. In this video, Moe Zainal teams up with Dave Cox to go over how a beautiful light painting composite of a hotrod was created. Dave Cox is a bit of a car light painting veteran (as you can see below with one of my favorite cars) and it's brilliant to see his workflow.

Have you done any light painting of cars? Share you results in the comments below.

Rob Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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3 Comments

"Light painting a car can be tricky to get right and difficult to know exactly what steps to take in camera. This video shows you the complete process, from garage space through to finished (and frankly brilliant) image."

1 - nothing was shown about the "steps to take in camera". Not one mention of exposures, how he moves around the car, what to look for when doing this, a workflow to ensure he captures essential shots, etc.
2 - this shows him walking through how he worked in Lightroom and PS, but not how he went about masking and what he was looking for out of each image as they were brought in to the workflow.

This should have been part of a 2-3 part series that would be getting the images, LR workflow, and PS workflow.

Umm . . . photographers were "light painting" not just cars, but buildings, interiors, still-lifes, etc, etc, etc looooooooong before LED lights came along.

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