Five Photo Hacks to Paint with Light

Besides shooting cars or architecture, light painting can also be useful when you want to achieve creative results without spending lots of money.

The principle of light painting is very basic: capturing long exposure shots while lighting the subject with a continuous light source. This technique is mainly used in car, architecture, and product photography, where traditional lighting methods don’t work as anticipated. Lighting a large house ceiling, creating light beams around a car or even lighting an interior of a vehicle can be done easily via light painting. But also, light painting can be applied to any genre of photography when an extra creative touch is needed.

The good thing about light painting is that you can use any continuous light source you want, and it is relatively a cost-effective solution for achieving creative effects. You can either use a small torch or a professional LED stick such as Westcott Ice Light 2 to paint your subject (or the background) with light.

In this five-minute video by COOPH, you will find five tricks about how to light paint with various light sources, including projectors, barcode scanners, and even drones.

Have you ever tried light painting with unusual light sources? Please share your work in the comments section below.

Burak Erzincanli's picture

Burak is a photographer and creative retoucher specialising in fashion and advertising, working with international clients from Canada, Europe and Australia.

Currently lives and works in Manchester, UK.

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2 Comments

Pretty cool and fun video. You do however know you are never ever supposed to shine a laser into someones eyes, right?? The scanner and hand held laser could cause serious damage to someones eyes, showing this being done is just thoughtless & reckless.
The rest of the video is cool though.

Great video! In regards to the barcode scanner, nowadays barcode scanners use LEDs for the aim patterns. So as long as it is a digital capture scanner and not your old typical laser barcode scanner it would cause as much harm as a normal led panel or led flashlight.