Today’s guest post on light painting is by Sean Needham:
Light art isn’t new, it’s been a part of photography ever since the first light dropped on a light sensitive material. Light painting isn’t new either, and I can’t claim that I “invented” the idea, but this is just my perspective of it.
Most of the “light painting” I saw for a long time didn’t really impress me, as it felt cold, more as if someone was just throwing a lot of light at a subject and a lot of this I don’t feel has any “bite” to it. So I ignored the area for a long time; until I was watching somebody paint with oils on canvas as part of a speed painting competition and the little “what if?” circuit that everyone has started to place things in to order.
When I started experimenting with this, I was at a loss to what to do as most people, most articles on it just seemed to concentrate on delivering as much light on to the subject as quickly as possible to bring it up against the rest of the scene or the background, but this was not the effect I was looking for. I wanted to isolate the subject(s), the scene, present it artistically and intentionally make people who knew the scene that was being presented question what they were looking at for a moment because of the isolation.
