Avoid This Lightpainting Mistake

Today we are talking about light painting cars. Light painting is when you take a long exposure photo or a series of long exposure photos in the dark and you use a light source to strategically expose the surfaces of the car that you want to be lit. If it's dark enough you won't show up in the frame and usually you move the light to expose entire surfaces evenly during a long 10 or 15 second exposure. It's almost like we're simulating having a huge overhead soft box. We can make our light source much larger than it is because the camera is capturing an image over an extended period and it can create really nice highlights. You can use a flashlight, you can use a flash, but for this we're talking specifically about probably the most common technique nowadays. Lighting a car with an LED stick type light. Hey, why should someone watch a light painting tutorial from someone who hates light painting? I don't hate light painting. Maybe I kind of do a little bit. Don't worry that shouldn't affect how this goes. So anyway, you use an LED stick type thing and you shoot multiple exposures lighting different parts of the car and you composite them together later with photo editing software. There are a million tutorials for this out there but I think you'll find that I have kind of a unique view on it. Because you hate light painting. Do we have to get into this now? Sure. Why not? Yeah, I have a few gripes with light painting and I'll get into those but there's one big hang-up I have and it is that no one ever considers the context of the light. Like, what is the motivation of the light? As in, is this realistic? Does light ever actually do this? All of my early light painting experiments were me driving to the middle of nowhere at night somewhere really dark and I messed with cheap hardware store lights and long exposures and I thought it looked cool but something was always off with shadows or whatever. I said at the top that we're effectively simulating an overhead studio softbox but if we're outdoors in a remote field that just doesn't make any sense. Who's lighting this car? Where is it coming from? Did aliens light this? So right away I think that a lot of light painting I see looks silly at a fundamental suspension of disbelief level. The good news is that if you're shooting indoors or near buildings or near an urban environment I don't really have that issue as much. You can suspend your disbelief. It can trick your brain because we don't necessarily know what the lights are on the ceiling. So maybe this is natural and not completely impossible. So just consider the context. You can still go out to the middle of nowhere to figure out this technique and experiment but think about what the light is doing or even come up with an inventive way to create a visual story for why the car is lit this way in this environment. So with that said let's jump into this lesson. The gear you'll need is a tripod obviously and an LED stick type light. I'm using the Sirui T120 they sent me last year that I reviewed. I attached the lights with a swivel bracket to a monopod to get it up above me and overhead from the car. You also need either a friend to snap exposures or a remote trigger for your camera so you don't have to run back and forth to press the shutter. Okay we're gonna do this in four individual shots. The first one is the side of the car. I'm walking past just making a smooth motion trying to keep that light up high to kind of create that sort of softbox aesthetic. And it came out pretty good. Nice smooth highlight there. Don't worry about that stuff in the top left. Same thing for the front of the car and it's pretty smooth. These are 10 second exposures. I'm not messing with the settings each time. It's dark enough that if it's a little too long it's not gonna really matter. Now for this this shot this is I'm getting the shadow and I'm gonna use this as the background. A lot of people miss this including me in the early days but this is gonna be our fake light source. You see that long shadow even though this isn't actually the light source it's gonna kind of trick your eye. And then one quick sixth of a second exposure to get those headlights. There we are. Now let's edit them together. So we've got our four images. Maybe make some little adjustments to them and then open them all in Photoshop layers and this will put them all in one document with them stacked. And because these were all remote shutter I shouldn't even need to align them. They're all exactly positioned correctly. So I'm going to reposition them in the order that they were shot and then rename them based on names that will make it a little easier. The not so fun part is doing a clipping mask around the car. So for this I like to create a levels adjustment layer and brighten it up just temporarily so that I can see the edges really clearly when I zoom in and use the pen tool and make a really tedious adjustment layer. So we're gonna do this really fast. And eventually you end up with a selection. I've maybe refined it a little bit but I have this selection and a folder with a mask on it so anything we put in this folder it's going to isolate. We can delete that levels adjustment layer that I said was temporary just for creating the mask. And then I'm going to grab the side and the front layers and put those in our folder with the mask on it and then set one of them, the one on top, to the lighten blend mode. So the front is now blending with the side shots. So that looks pretty good already with our background. And then we'll add the lights in. Those could be isolated in the mask or if we leave them outside I like that it gives us some glow on the concrete there by not putting it in the mask. And then there we have it. I said I had a few more gripes with light painting and they are pretty minor. It isn't very practical to do a lot of photos this way because it's so slow, requires so much post-production. So if you're shooting a full photo set for a car you probably can't do tons of photos like this. So these will stick out for better or worse from the set. Another thing is I just don't really have my own spin on light painting. Many times you know if it's done in a technically proficient way it all sort of looks the same. I've done some weird long exposure lighting that I've covered in tutorials right on this channel but as far as normal straightforward light painting I don't really have like a unique thing to offer so I don't really pursue it very much. One shot that I liked was having this concept of a single car spotlit amongst all these other cars from kind of far away and above and I liked how this turned out but you can't do that every time. And my last gripe is just that the thrill of photography for me is taking a photo and seeing something that that I think looks cool pop up on the camera. I like the instant gratification so compositing five shots the next day in Photoshop even if it ends up turning out great is just just doesn't give me the same buzz. It's not a purist thing I just I just like getting a shot and seeing in the camera rather than getting like a part of a shot a piece of something. Didn't you say the next video was gonna be about drones? Yeah I said that obviously this isn't it it's it's coming. Let's let's wrap this up. There are lots of light painting tutorials out there but I'm not sure if any of those others tell you to think about the context of the light before you ever take a photo. Try to have an idea bring something else to it bring a story to the light-painted image. I think there's a lot that's unexplored there that could be really interesting. If you include the suggestion of an interesting light source in the image your eye will probably believe it is the light source even if it's not. I think there's a lot of room for inventiveness here. So that's all. Thank you for watching and see you next time.