Light Painting Portrait Tutorial

What's up everybody, Jason Page here and in this light painting tutorial we are going to talk about specifically light painting portraits. The lovely Elena here will be sitting in for me and we are going to show you how to make sure that she is in focus when you're creating a light painting portrait. And there's two main ways to make sure that your model is in focus. Number one is your model, Elena here, has to stay as still as possible anytime that light is illuminated onto her. Just some theory really quick, your camera is basically an instrument for recording light. When creating a light painting portrait all the lights are going to be out so the only thing that the camera is going to be able to record is whatever light you shine on your subject or model. If I don't shine light onto her the camera can't see anything because it's just simply too dark for the camera to record. A very common mistake I see in light painting portraits is that people will illuminate their subject more than once. And so for instance if I go over Elena like this and I illuminate her she's now recorded onto the camera. No matter what an amazing model she is, no matter how still she can be, as you can see she's just a wonderful model being very still, no matter how still she can stay there's always going to be a little bit of movement. So if I illuminate her one time she's now recorded onto the camera. If I just a split second later go over her again there's going to be a little bit of movement and that is what's creating the blur that you're seeing in your images. So again the absolute first key to getting your model or subject in focus in a light painting portrait is to only illuminate them one time. Now what I'm really excited to show you is this is the new tool from Light Painting Brushes. This is the Light Painting Portrait Attachment and what this tool does is it makes it very easy to illuminate your model in one single pass of light. As you can see it's very evenly illuminated all the way across and when we turn off the lights and we're going to actually run through a couple here and I'll show you how it's done, but when we turn off the lights all I've got to do is just go over one pass of light like that and then Elena is going to be perfectly in focus. We're going to create some really easy images here. I'm going to show you the difference between doing it right and wrong so I'm going to do one pass of light show you that and then I'll have her just move a little bit and we'll do two passes of light that way you can kind of see how there will be blur in the image no matter how still she's actually able to stay and then we're just going to expand on that and do a bunch of light painting portraits using other tools from Light Painting Brushes. We're going to do the fiber optic. I'll just go around her with one of the light swords and things like that. The settings are ISO 200 f8 and shooting on bulb mode, but literally this will be a maybe five second exposure using the portrait light attachment from Light Painting Brushes, the universal connector, and the Soonfire DS30 flashlight. We'll go ahead and get into a few now. Thank you, Elena. You're welcome, Jason. All right, here we go. We're starting the exposure and just one single pass of light and as you can see Elena is staying as still as possible and that is it. As you can see, she's perfectly in focus. Just one single pass of the light using the Light Painting Brushes portrait light attachment. In this one, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over her with one pass of light and then I'm going to have her move just a hair so that she's a little blurry. This is just showing the example of what will happen if you do more than one pass of light. As you can see in the first one, she's nice and focused, evenly illuminated. This is what's going to happen if you do more than one pass of light. First one, all right, and just move just a little bit. Okay, all right, and should be in that one. Perfect. So now in this one, you can see Elena moved her head just a little bit, but because she got two passes of light, it shows her blurry. The blurry head or blurry effect can be a desired effect if it's something that you're after. So in this, what I'm going to do is just have Elena look this way. She's going to then look straight on, then she's going to look off to the other side. I'm going to illuminate her head three different times, only once over her body. So it's going to look like her head is basically like she has three heads. Perfect. Let's try it. Yeah. Ready? Okay. Okay. All right. Perfect. There you go. Totally weird. So anyway, what is that? So anyway, that was just a little, we kind of went off on a tangent there, but that is, there's ways to use this as a desired effect. That's not the point of this tutorial. The point of this tutorial is to obviously have your model in focus. So having your model in focus, one single pass of the light, all your model has to do is stay as still as possible. Anytime that they're illuminated. So now we're just going to go and experiment a little bit using the exact same technique. I'm going to go over with the light painting brushes, portrait light. I'm going to illuminate her, except we're going to add a couple additional elements into these images. I'm going to go around her with a sword. That's going to create like a band of light, go around her with some fiber optics and things like that. And we'll see what we come up with. So we're going to do a couple of those right now. All right. So that is it. The keys to keeping your model in focus. Anytime your model is illuminated, they stay as still as possible as the light painter, one single pass of the light. That's pretty much it. Make sure you're focused prior. You always want to be on manual focus when you're shooting in the dark so that your camera is not searching for focus. Once the lights go out, you can use autofocus in the lights like this. Obviously we're in the studio. I can turn on the lights, zoom in, focus on her using autofocus or manual focus, but I always want to make sure I switch back to manual focus for when the lights go out so that the camera is not searching. If you enjoy light painting, if you enjoy light painting content, if you enjoy the videos that we are making, please do hit the subscribe button. If you want to see more of Elena in my videos, just comment down below. Say we want more Elena. Right? That's right. That's it. Ask and you shall receive. The link to the portrait light is down below. I'm very excited about this light. I use it in all my portraits. I will show you guys a bunch more right here at the end of the video, all created using this light. So thank you guys very much for watching. Have a good night until the next time. Get out there and get creative.