From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

Write in the sky with light - iPhone Tutorial

From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

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Write in the sky with light

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- Hey, everybody, Sean here. Welcome back to another special edition of Mobile Photography Weekly After Dark. This week we're going to be working with light painting, painting with trails of light in a night exposure, and we're going to be shooting with this Huawei P10 Android phone. We worked with the same phone in a previous episode, where we were photographing stars at night. This phone is particularly well-suited to photograph scenes at night, and what we have going on here is we have this field of bowling balls, about a hundred and thirty of them. Don't ask me why they're here. And a cool, old antique truck. I've got three lights that we have illuminating the truck. There's a Lume Cube light behind the truck. I have another Lume Cube light inside the cab of the truck, and I'm going to use this third Lume Cube light to paint the scene, to illuminate the foreground, then we're going to bring another element. We're going to have my friend, Jacob come in. He's got a frisbee with multi-colored, illuminated lights, so, he's going to be tracing contours around the truck. We're going to do this in two passes, so, first, I'm going to illuminate the foreground scene of the truck, and then we're going to turn all the lights off, and then he's going to go through with the illuminated frisbee. We're going to paint that, and we're going to see what we can get. So, what I'm going to do is I'm already in the light trail painting here. I'm just going to tap here to make sure it's got a good focus on that truck, and I'm going to lock that exposure and focus down there. And so, what we're going to do now, is we're going to bring down the video lights that are illuminating me so you can see what I'm doing, and then, we're going to do the exposure, and you'll see it build up in real time here on the Huawei camera phone. Alright, so, I'm going to start it, and the first thing I'm going to do, is I'm going to get my Lume Cube here and turn it on. And you can see as I paint on this, you can see the details start to come in there, and the bowling balls, I'll get a little bit closer to the truck there and paint it. Maybe come around and paint the front of the truck a little bit. I think that that is looking pretty good for the truck. Alright, I'm going to turn this Lume Cube off, and then, if we could turn the Lume Cube off behind the truck. And now, Jacob's going to come in and do his magic with the illuminated flying disc, and there he comes, excellent. I just love watching it build up in real time there. It is so cool. And, of course, we're only seeing the light from that illuminated disc. We're not really seeing Jacob's form because he's not illuminated. And we're getting this nice build up, almost like this cool cartoon truck. Oh, excellently done, Jacob. You have a talent for this. I like it. So, another thing about this to keep in mind is that this is kind of trial and error stuff, and we've already done a few tests to sort of get an idea of what works here for this. And so, when you're doing stuff like this on your own, definitely trial and error but with a phone like this, where you can see the exposure build up in real time, it's pretty cool and easy to do these sorts of shots. Alright, that looks excellent. How about tracing the cab a little bit, very cool. And you know what's really great about this type of photography is that it's just kind of fun. It's very infectious and you kind of really get into it, and you keep trying things, and you go what about this, what about this? And even though it's late at night here, we're all really jazzed about doing this. So, I'm going to stop the exposure now. We'll stop that, and then we'll take a look at it. Alright, so, here's the shot. I'm just going to zoom up on it here and check it out. You can see these great, multi-colored light trails. So, as you can see, you can get really fun results from this technique, and since it's dark out, you're not revealing the person wielding the light source. You could just paint with light, and you can build up different types of light sources as I did here with the foreground light and having Jacob add the colored light in there as well. So, if you haven't tried this by all means give it a try. Need to have your camera on a tripod of course, but it's a great new area of photography to explore. If you haven't done so, check it out.

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