A rather grainy look at the creation of a "Ball of Light" (Orb ) with Denis Smith

9/17/2012 ISO 1200 Magazine 0 Comments

One of the things I really enjoy is watching people get excited about light painting. For 2 years now I have used Flickr as my main source of photo/video sharing so many here would not have seen 90% of my work as Facebook is relatively new for me.

I forget sometimes the pieces I have created that give hints and tips. I will probably never give a blow by blow tutorial on creating an orb. Learning the process is the fun. Playing, experimenting and exploring is why I love it so much and I only encourage others to do the same.

However, here is a little timelapse I made that shows pretty clearly the fundamentals. Obviously I have used completely different camera settings than I would normally so you can see me and so on.

Ok some technical stuff for those budding light painters out there.

I am always asked about how I get my images to look like day light. It is a big picture, but to start with you need some moon. It is a great light source that can bring any landscape to life.

I was in the Flinders Ranges some time back during a full moon. During the night there was a full lunar eclipse, so what better way to demonstrate the effect the moon has than this.

The images you see here are all taken with exactly the same camera settings. The left image is taken with a fully bright moon, and the image on the right is taken with absolutely no moon. I actually took about a dozen shots, but you can see clearly here what the settings were, and times they were taken.