From the course: Photography Foundations: Night and Low Light

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Light painting: in front of the camera

Light painting: in front of the camera

In the last movie, you saw us paint a subject in the frame with a flashlight. You couldn't see the flashlight itself, but you could see the light that was hitting Heather as she sat in the frame. A long exposure like this in low light, we can create another effect by making the light itself visible. That burns a nice light into the image which we can then play with. We are going to try that right now. Jacob is going to go into frame with his flashlight and do a little bit of light painting directly into the camera, and I think when that happens, this is all going to make sense to you. Jacob, are you ready? All right! Jacob: Yeah. Can we kill this light over here? Again, we've got artificial light on so that you can see me. All right, Jacob, you're going to have 20 seconds. Now as in the previous example, we have all--I've already calculated the ambient light exposure settings, so that I know that with this 20-second exposure, I'm going to have a lot of nice ambient light on the tree…

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