Local Guides light painting

I was at a light painting session tonight, so I painted Local Guides :grin:

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@PaulPavlinovich Beautiful… Could you please explain a little bit about light painting?

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So beautiful!!

I would like to do !

How could you make it??

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wow light painting how did u made it Thank you @PaulPavlinovich sharing with us…

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Really nice, thank you for sharing @PaulPavlinovich .

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Ahahahah some random words! :slight_smile: Nice idea @PaulPavlinovich !

Did you shoot a single photo for the whole writing?

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nicely done @PaulPavlinovich

I love light painting :slight_smile:

looks like a perfect painters @PaulPavlinovich

Good painting indeed, thank you for sharing.

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Not nearly as elegant but here is one from Fiji - Bula means Hello in Fijian.

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For those who like an explanation, I use a home made light wheel. The wheel is from an old wheel chair (poor bloke goes around in circles all day now) and a strip of multi coloured LED with a controller that lets you control the colour, patterns, and light behaviour. This is fixed to the wheel with cable ties. The whole thing is powered by a small USB battery pack. I used to use a pack of AA batteries but this got a bit expensive so I changed to USB rechargeable power. The whole cost (without the power pack was about AU$25).

Basically you set the colour pattern and intensity you want (in the main picture I had a variable slow pulse colour change) and then you write whatever you want SDRAWKCAB (backwards) and that is the really hard bit. It takes quite a bit of practice. You either need to stop the light for between each letter or turn it away from the camera (this is what I do). You can also use the light wheel for painting other things such as funny pink unicorns that breathe fire if you try hard enough. It takes a bit of practice to get this right. The best way to learn is play. Try and always void wearing bright colours and avoid glasses, ear-rings or other things that would reflect light and be visible in the photo.

The next challenge is exposure, if you happen to have an Olympus mirrorless camera (like me) then you can use the feature called Live Composite and expose basically as long as you want. Live Composite is cool because it is called an additive exposure. It basically does lots of short exposures (you set the duration to get the light quality you want) and it adds them together recording only new light into a single RAW file and after you finish jpeg. This means things like bright light sources in the background don’t get any brighter. If you’ve got some other kind of camera then you’ll have to use your stone age long exposure or bulb exposure and hope you don’t blow out your background while you’re painting. It takes me about 15 seconds to paint “localguides”. You probably cannot capture this on a phone because not many of them support a true long exposure.

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@PaulPavlinovich Thank you for the detailed explanation.

Amazing as always @PaulPavlinovich ! Did it took you a lot of time to master the light painting?

Bula @Nick-Hobgood ! I personally think that your photo looks incredible and I can’t wait to see more.

!gnirahs rof htob uoy knahT :slight_smile:

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Thanks @KlaudiyaG !

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I don’t think I’ve mastered it @KlaudiyaG every time I try - something new crops up - writing backwards is difficult - you need to think about it before you start - I’m terrible with S half the time I do them the “right” way around. I try to remember by drawing a 5 instead which when backwards is S :). The other thing that can be difficult is letter spacing - while you’re thinking about drawing the next letter, you have to think about how wide the last letter was e.g. M is biggger so you also need to take an appropriate sized step. The painted letters look best a little bit crowded like they are in this image, but you want to minimise overlap.

I’ve got a good friend in SF who will be able to help me do some light painting (by taking turns who paints and who minds the cameras) - I want to try and paint a massive Local Guides Connect Live or maybe #localguidesconnectlive along the Golden Gate Bridge - the best bit is it will spam everyone else doing long exposures of the bridge that night :).

Really nice, thank you for sharing

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Beautiful light painting @PaulPavlinovich

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