Light Painting

In preparation for taking school pictures, Computer Graphics students have been learning about photography.
If you break the word down into its roots, photo means light and graph means writing so photography means light writing. It makes sense- early photographs were made by exposing silver particles on treated plates to light which recorded the image. One fun way to really drive home the point about "light writing" is to "paint" with light.

We made our light paintings by going into a totally dark room and taking a long exposure photograph while we used lights to write, draw, or paint. The path of the light and anything it shows is recorded on the image. We used a tripod for our 10 second exposures and tried out different ideas. You don't need a fancy camera to try light painting, you just need to be able to change the shutter speed and put the camera on a tripod.

These students tried spinning in circles while holding a light.

 On the left, a student found that you could shine a bright light from underneath the plastic tables. On the right, a student waved her cell phone around, displaying many colors.

 It took a few tries, but we got a nice sword fight.

Here we tried to make an ocean scene with a fish in front and blue waves behind.