Fairies

[rafiq]

Wings painted with LED light, taken on a Canon 40D, 50mm, 5 secs at f/5.6.

This is my first how to post, hope you enjoy it.

Fairies are fun right? Not necessarily. When they don’t exist and real life doesn’t look as magical as the movies, it sometimes takes some convincing, a lot of patience (emphasis on “a lot”) and countless retakes to get your gorgeous niece’s to pose for you.

Now the basic idea with “light painting” is to set your camera to a real slow exposure then using some kind of light source you just paint whatever you want before exposure ends. In this case I used some LED light key chains.

It's all good and well taking a long exposure of inanimate objects however with people, especially kids, you have problems because they move around a lot and come out blurry. My solution to this is to freeze them using a flash set to rear curtain sync mode.

I always try to get my flash off the camera but in this case immediately ran into a big problem. I don’t think it’s possible to set a Canon Speedlite flash to rear curtain sync mode when used off camera with Canon’s wireless system. What I did in this case was leave my 580EXII on camera but have it turned backwards facing a reflective umbrella mounted on a light stand. The umbrella was positioned above and to the right of the camera and managed to throw back enough light on my cute little subjects.

Once that was all set up I first kept the camera on Aperture Priority mode and kept turning the dial until I got a 10 second shutter speed with an f-stop of about f4 or so. To further prevent the camera from registering any movement by the subject or myself as I painted the wings I further underexposed the scene by 2 more stops. I did this by setting the camera to Manual then dialing in a 5 second shutter speed with an f-stop of 5.6 but I could have just dialled in –2EV while still in Aperture Priority mode. Now 5 seconds is quite a short time to run behind my niece and paint in the wings so I also set my camera on timer. That allowed me to get in position before the exposure started, paint the wings in 4 seconds and spend the last second doing a military jump and roll out of the scene before the flash fired.

One thing to bear in mind is that the longer you hold the light in the same position the more it blows out. You can see a good example of this on my flickr site where my niece's finger is pointing to a bright tiny fairy that is actually the light blowing out.

This is a lot of fun to do, but with kids just remember you need a lot of patience.

This post is adapted from the post on my blog. You can check it out for some more photos in this same series as well as a test photo.

[myfotoguy]

Cool. Kids love making these kinds of shots too! I have not done this type of might painting with my kids yet, but this gives me ideas, thanks!

This summer I did a "ghost" with my kid and he loved it. Basically part of the way through the long exposure had my son move out of frame. Could do the effect much better in Photoshop with layers, but it give the kids something fun to do. I usuall stalk them and beg them to look at the camera, so doing fun things like this idea you posted are a nice idea to break the routine and have fun together.