I had a rare opportunity to light paint a house made of bottles. Here’s how I made the most of it. Best of all, you can use these light painting techniques for everything.
What is light painting?
Light painting is a term that is often used loosely to describe any addition of handheld light to a night photograph. Really, though, light painting is a technique that uses a handheld light source to illuminate a subject during a long exposure photo. You are quite literally painting the scene with light. Night photographers have used this technique for many decades.
Here, I had the opportunity to photograph a house made of over 50,000 bottles in a safe environment. I made the most of it.
Can I make it glow from within?
My first instinct was to shine the light from within the bottle house. I wanted the bottles to light up from within. I had been inside some bottle houses and structures in the Andean countryside of Ecuador, and I loved the way sunshine made the bottles glow.
Unfortunately, I could not do that for two reasons. One is that the inside walls were plastered. There would be no light shining through these bottles. And the second is that I didn’t have access to the interior of the house.
Shadows create depth, detail and interest
However, there were plenty of opportunities to create shadows. This can be used with almost any subject. Here’s how I went about light painting the porch of this amazing house.
Three steps to light painting the porch of the bottle house
Step one: Illuminating the back wall
The bottle house has a lot of amazing texture because it’s made of bottles. I skimmed a warm white light from the ProtoMachines against the wall, just glancing it off the surface. By doing this, I was able to pick up a lot of the detail from the uneven surface. I kept the back wall slightly darker than the rest of the house to add depth and keep the focus on the front of the porch.
Step two: Creating the shadows from the porch handrail
On camera right is a wooden porch handrail. Because the porch is wooden and takes up a lot of space in the composition, I thought it might be fun to create some shadow from the handrail. I stood to the right of the handrail and held the ProtoMachines light still for a short while so that the lines would be strong and well-defined.
Step three: Blue light from inside the house
The house still looked a little empty. I decided to shine a blue light from the inside of the room. I did this by walking over to the front window and shining a blue handheld light through that. This illuminated the entire room, coming out the side window and the door window in the back.
You are the director
When you light paint during night photography, you are making creative decisions. You decide what to illuminate and what to keep in shadow. You decide what angle, what sort of texture, what sort of feel, and what sort of colors you want in your photo. It is the most actively creative form of photography that I know. You are wandering around in the scene, determining the angles, colors and brightness. Every “brush stroke of light” builds the photo.
If you do this, you are one of a very small number of photographers who try. Far less stick with it. Hopefully, articles like this inspire you to keep doing it. I cannot possibly exaggerate how addicting, fun, and rewarding it is.
How can some of the techniques — including techniques creating shadow, depth and detail — help with light painting your subjects? How might you apply this toward abandoned automobiles, cactus, trees, mountains or people? What about other subjects that are not night photography?
