In my 9 years working as a photographer I had never experiment with light painting before. The slightly cliche wedding shots and urban style images I'd seen before that incorporated light painting just weren't for me. But after playing around at my studio with coloured gels, my passion for colour led me to wondering whether it would be possible to capture a more beauty style portrait using light painting techniques, and just because I'm a glutton for punishment I decided to
add on the extra challenge on doing it as a self portrait. I initially experimented at home just using my phone camera and the Adobe Lightroom app to adjust my shutter speed. I purchased one of those fibre optic lamps that slowly change colour, and set up another led light to sit to one side of my face.
I was surprised by how good the results were!
These were some of my favourite shots captured on my iPhone.
Whilst I was happy with these phone shots, and actually love the motion blur and graininess of them, I was keen to take this experiment to my studio to see my original brief through and capture those beauty shots. I used a single strobe light with a snoot modifier to strongly highlight part of my face like those gorgeous old Hollywood images by the likes of George Hurrell. Using a strobe light with snoot attached also meant that I was able to capture a sharper image whilst still at a slow enough shutter speed to get the light painting effect from the fibre optic lamp -it's not easy sitting still whilst smacking yourself
across the face with fibre optics! I used the Imaging edge app to wirelessly tether my camera to my phone, which enabled me to master my pose using my phone display and
press the shutter with a few seconds on the timer to allow me to put the phone down and get ready to sweep the fibre optics across my face and body.
I don't know whether this was just beginners luck, but the images I was capturing on my mirrorless camera were exactly what I was hoping for.
I hope you like them as much as I do,
and appreciate the challenge of light
painting in self portraiture. This is
what I love so much about the art of
photography, there is so much to
experiment with. Whether that's the
camera settings, lighting, angles,
colours.… the possibilities really are
endless and the rules are there to be
broken.
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This is a really cool combo of portrait and lightpainting! Thanks for sharing here with us in the community.
Thank you! I'm so thrilled that I managed to pull it off! 🙌🏻
I just saw your post now. These are so strikingly beautiful! I can't imagine having the patience to set up and shoot light painting this way, doing self portraits. Really amazing what you've done here. I feel inspired.
Thank you 😊 It was definitely a little more challenging than my usual self portraits! I was half expecting them to all be a total write off, so was absolutely thrilled with the results.
You're welcome! It's so wonderful when you think it won't work out and then you end up with something incredible. I was looking at some of your other posts as well and I like your photography. Do you think you might do more like this? I'd love to see what you create.
Thank you 😊 Hope you post your results! Would love to see how you get on.