The Magic of Light Painting

Getting Your Ambient Exposure

For most light-painting compositions, you’ll want an exposure between 30 seconds and 3 minutes to allow time to illuminate your subject. Longer and shorter speeds are certainly possible but this is a common range. The long exposures necessary for light painting can make testing for exposure and composition quite time consuming. One method for alleviating this problem is to open your aperture to it widest setting while testing.

This is a great technique when working in lighter environments. For example you could begin testing for exposure at 1 second at f/2.8. Lets say the first image comes out too dark, so you try 2 seconds at f/2.8 and decide you like the exposure. Now you can home in on your composition with a ...