Lighting painting with a rotating party light bulb

Light painting can be buckets of fun, and there are many different tools and techniques to achieve surreal imagery through it.

If you aren’t familiar with light painting, it’s essentially this: a long exposure—think several seconds—with the only light, or at least the most dominate light, coming from a constant light source that you or your subject is moving around. You know those family photos of spelling out a word with sparklers? Same thing really.

A fun tool I found for light painting is a rotating, multi-colored disco light bulb like this one here.

In an otherwise dark room, this lightbulb paints differing patterns depending on the exposure time and whether the bulb is moving or static. (A tripod of some sort is necessary for this technique.)

In this picture of a cologne bottle, I set the bottle on black foam core panel and hung the rotating light bulb directly above it. I experimented with the exposure time, compensating with the aperture to maintain proper exposure, until I got the light streaks how I like them. I settled on a fairly long exposure to allow the bulb to make several complete rotations to create consistency in the circles.

But the real fun I’ve found with this bulb is in portraits.

Here, I have my model leaning against a wall for added stability and asked her to remain as still as possible. I gave her a countdown while the shutter was open.

With a comparatively shorter exposure, the rotating light created dapples of color. With a longer exposure, the colors became layered lines.

With a comparatively shorter exposure, the rotating light created dapples of color. With a longer exposure, the colors became layered lines.

Patience is essential in getting good photos from this. Both in figuring out what shutter speed will work for any given situation, and then in taking the same photo over and over again, because any little shift in the subject’s pose will blur the photo.

This photo is a combination of flash and light painting. The subject is light with a gelled flash on either side, and the rotating bulb is set on the floor behind her pointed at a white backdrop several feet away. I was careful to flag my flashes off of the background so only the light painting would show up.

Another option would be to have my subject duck out of frame after the flashes fired, which would overlay the light painting on their shape, much like a double exposure.

Any kind of light can be used for light painting. Go nuts! Flashlights, novelty light bulbs, light wands, fiber optic lights, led strips, whatever. I find that focused, point light is easier to work with than something that throws light everywhere, but it depends on what you’re going for.

- Matthew