Painting with Light

For a date night a few weeks ago, Justin and I had a blast "painting" with light!  We went into campus and used a dark conference room, set up my camera, turned on our flashlights and had a lot of fun drawing! 

For anyone curious how to do this... use as dark of a room as possible, although a little light is ok.  The room we used was not as dark as the pictures make it look--we could easily move around the room and see each other.  The trick is to set your camera so that only the light from the flashlights are detected and not any of the ambient light in the room. 

To do this, make sure your camera is in manual mode.  Set your camera to ISO 100, and set your aperture as small as possible--like f/22.  This prevents ambient light in the room from entering the camera.  We are obviously standing behind our drawings and moving around a bunch, but the only light the camera will detect with these settings is the light from the flashlight that you point at the camera. 

Then set your shutter speed for however long you want or need--anywhere from 15-30 seconds should be good.  Most drawings we could do in 15-20 seconds, but for the more detailed drawings or bigger phrases we set the shutter speed for 30 seconds. 

Remember to turn off your flashlight when you "pick up your pencil".  Turning on and off your flashlight takes some time and thought, especially when writing words.  You'll want your camera on a tripod or set it on a table to prevent blur.  It was sometimes hard to keep our pictures centered in the frame, but you soon get a feel for your space.

We had so much fun and took SO many more pictures than what I've included here.  I had no idea we'd be able to spend SO much time having fun with this!  We'll definitely be doing this again for another date night, and next time get more competitive to see who can draw the best version of a particular picture!

We started with simple pictures (a boat, flower, and fireworks) and writing our names, although it took Justin several tries to get his "s" the right direction!  It's like trying to write in a mirror--which made things challenging and very funny!

We had contests to see who could write a phrase or word correctly the first time.

We also played a little pictionary where we each had to guess what was being drawn before looking at the image on the camera.  It was pretty hard, but so fun to see the image on the camera after and laugh!