Light wands are a brilliant way of painting with light that looks completely L different. While we used a collapsible sword from Light Painting Brushes for our photo shoot, you could also use an LED ICE light or even a toy lightsabre if you have one to hand – then get creative with how you swing it through the frame to add an interesting flair to your night-time portraits.
A tripod is once again vital to this technique, with a long exposure providing enough time to record the trail of light as the wand is swung through the frame. However, you don’t want to push the exposure time too far, or you’ll start to record movement in the model. A shutter speed of one to three seconds will work well. We’ll also show you how to freeze your model with a little off-camera flash to eliminate their movement in the frame.
DRESS CODE: BLACK
Wear dark clothing so that you’re less likely to be picked up in your light painting photos. As you can see in this example even wearing dark clothes, I still appeared faintly on the right. It’s always worth taking a ‘blank’ frame of the scene, which you can superimpose over your final shot: this makes it easy to remove any areas where the light painter has appeared. Alternatively, use the Clone Stamp Tool or the Spot Healing Brush in Photoshop.