Girl with bright colors swirling around her

young man with streaks of green light behind him

girl with angel wings and a halo made of light

guy with devil wings and a tail made out of light

I take a lot of typical portrait photos like business headshots, family photos, senior photos, etc. But for this shoot, I decided to get a little out of the box and add a bit of creative light painting. Light painting photography is done by leaving the shutter of your camera open for an extended period of time, then using a light source to “paint” on the image. Essentially anywhere the light touches is filled in and exposed. The longer and more intense a light shines in a given location, the brighter it will be. In this blog, I will walk you through how I did this shoot so you can go out and do your own light painting photo shoot!

For you photographers out there, this is pretty simple thing to do by just putting your camera into bulb mode (For canon cameras is it the mode on the top wheel labeled “B”, for Sony and Nikon cameras, slow your shutter speed all the way down by turning the dial until you see the word Bulb instead of a shutter speed value). Bulb mode replaces a defined shutter speed with the ability to manually hold your camera’s shutter open. Simply press and hold the shutter release button and the shutter will stay open, capturing any light you add, until you let go of the button, closing the shutter. If you do not have a friend to help hold the shutter button while the light is being painted on, then a remote shutter release is recommended. If neither are possible, you can set your shutter speed to be long enough for you to get your light painting done. I like to use bulb mode however because you aren’t ever feeling rushed and you aren’t ever sitting around waiting for that 30 second shutter speed you selected to finish up. As for other camera settings, set your iso to 100 and avoid super low f-stops. You can set your f-stop based on your desired depth of field but shooting wide open could cause some issues with pulling focus as I will mention later on.

The next thing you’ll need to do is pick a location. Somewhere dark is preferred since any ambient light in your scene will compound upon itself for the duration of your shutter being open. I selected my garage for the location for this shoot since this is primarily a portrait shoot and I don’t want a distracting background to take any attention from my subject. My garage has a simple yet pleasing brick wall and only one window that can be easily covered by a sheet to remove all ambient light. You can get creative with your location especially if you want it to feature more prominently in the picture. I recommend you go out at night to keep conditions dark. I’d love to experiment with doing one at dusk during blue hour. I think it could create some cool dreamy vibes. A VND filter would be a must have for this in case the ambient light is too overpowering.

The last thing you need is your light source(s). A lot of times you see RGB light tubes being used to paint with, but those are expensive and any light source will do. I used a running headlamp for the angel and demon photos and a cheap color-changing desk lamp for the colorful background. Get creative with your light sources, they all will create a slightly different effect!

Now we can address the part of this shoot that was most important and difficult for me, focus. I wanted to create images that were both creative light painting photos and good-looking portrait photos. This means having tack sharp focus on their eyes while having the ability to leave the shutter open for anywhere from 5-20 seconds to paint. They would have to sit unbelievably still or else they turn into a cloud of blur! There may be people out there who can stay that still for that amount of time, but my subjects were not those people. I’m not even sure it is humanly possible, but that is fine because it is not required. They key to keeping your subject in focus is to only expose them one time. every additional time you expose your subject, another “version” of them will appear and even if they moved less than an inch, it still makes the photo look out of focus.

Here is an example of when I tried to expose my subject with the same light I was painting with. Light was hitting them the entire time and they were sitting as still as they possibly could. Not going to work.

how to avoid blurry photos when light painting

There are 2 ways to properly expose your subject and which one you use will depend on what equipment you have access to. The first is to take a light source and paint the light onto your subject in a single motion, kind of like how stadium employees use the wand metal detectors at sports games. Do not go over more than once. If you feel like you have missed a spot, start over with a new photo. The speed at which you move the light will affect the brightness of the light on your subject. Make it very clear that your subject cannot move a muscle during this process. If they are struggling, give them an easier pose and or facial expression to hold. Seated poses are much easier to hold than standing poses. Be aware of what direction your light source is coming from, what type of source it is, and what lighting you are trying to achieve. You will need to experiment with this to find what works best for you. The larger and softer your light source, the better (ie. maybe don’t use the headlamp for this part).

The second way to expose your subject and the one I prefer to use. This is by using a flash. I set up a flash to quickly expose my subject, setting up the positioning and intensity to get the exact lighting I want. Staying completely still is not nearly important in this setup because flashes typically flash at around 1/400 of a second at their highest power meaning the “shutter speed” of the photo when it comes to your subject is essentially 1/400 or faster. As long as they don’t move so much that their silhouette significantly changes and as long as you don’t put any light onto their face again, they will be tack sharp. For this shoot, I used a Godox V1 with a medium sized softbox.

There is one more aspect of focus that I had to address that you may or may not run into. This was the fact that since I was shooting in such a dark space, the autofocus on my camera did not work at all. I was continuously hunting for focus. I was shooting with a Canon R6 which in my experience has excellent autofocus, so I had to find another way. This is where circling back to what aperture you’re using is important. I shot these portraits at around 50mm f.8. I did this because I wanted my entire subject’s head to be in focus, my background did not need to be super blurred out, and because the larger depth of field gave me more wiggle room for my subject to literally wiggle and stay within the area that was in focus. To pull focus, the lights in the room would be turned on, I would focus onto one of my subject’s eyes, then while focused, I would flip the camera into manual focus and communicate to my subject that they could no longer move. Make sure your subject is posed and briefed on what facial expression to make before any of this. Then the lights go off and I open the shutter. I had it set up so that when the shutter button was initially pressed, the flash would fire. With the subject exposed and captured the fun part could begin!

Now is when you really get to experiment and let your creativity flow! The only thing to keep in mind is the speed that you move your light source impacts the intensity of the light. If you whip it through the frame really fast it will look a bit more wispy, if you move slow it will be a solid line of light. And do not forget, DO NOT EXPOSE YOUR SUBJECT’S FACE AGAIN! The only time you would do that is if it was a creative choice you were intentionally making. Maybe to add additional ghostly faces in different positions for example. Seriously, be careful because it can be hard to tell on the little camera screen if the picture got messed up.

Here is an example of a picture that I thought we had nailed and would turn out great, only to find out when I pulled it up on the computer that the light from the halo had been hitting her face and making everything blurry.

example of what not to do for long exposure portraits

I hope you learned something from this and will go try some light painting portrait photo shoots of your own! After much experimentation and tweaking, here are the favorites from this shoot. Enjoy! If you would like to have a portrait session of your own, contact us and we will get your shoot scheduled!