Posts Tagged ‘Painting with light’

With the increased availability of photography editing software and the introduction of new, easier to use compositing tools, 'trick' photos have become much more common. Compositing together photos to create a trick photo is not a new technique though - even in the early 20th century photos would be cut up then stuck together to form a new image.

However, trick photography isn't just compositing photos together to make something new. There are plenty of tricks that can be performed right in camera, with no Photoshop wizardry needed at all.

In this article we'll look at 10 different tricks that can be achieved wholly in-camera but usually work best with some post production editing as well.

Light painting is the process of manually lighting a photo during a long exposure, often using a torch or small LED lights. There are two types of light painting photography. One is where you shine the light onto your subject, I have covered this previously in How to use light painting for flower photography. In this article, we'll look at how to do light painting where you use the light source as the actual subject of the photo, painting the light into the air.

Painting the City by StandUPP on flickr (licensed CC-BY)