Tag: light painting

By chance I saw an advert on Facebook for a light painting work shop in Chislehurst Caves. An Olympus UK event promoting the OM-D E-M1 Mk2 and the chance to play around with its unique “Live Composite” feature.

I got me thinking, what would I paint down in the caves.  A while back, I ran a small workshop with friends and came up with a line of stick men walking bay a dome.

Except now I have some Electro Luminescent wire and reckon thought that could add a new dimension!  So…… I had a practise on the driveway and came up with this.

Nice.  The green wire worked really well.  But I couldn’t help thinking it needed something more, so I thought “can I paint a poppy?”.

Had a go…

Put it all together and I ended up with this, which I was rather pleased with.

Next stop Chislehurst Caves

After playing around with the Olympus, which was great fun (see some samples in Light Painting With an Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mk2), I came up with this…

It’s still not right, but that’s part of the journey.  I’m sure I’ll revisit this again, but for now (today at least) this is it 🙂

How’s it done?  This was using a Canon 70 with Multiple Exposures enabled.  This shot is 4 images which the camera lays on top of each other.  First the green misty grass, then the poppy, then the soldiers, then the cave walls.  This is nothing new, you used to be able to do this in the old 35mm film days.  However, the bonus of digital, is you get to see each layer, and if you screw one up, you go back one layer and redo it, which I had to with the poppy!

Hope you like it.

I had the pleasure of attending an Olympus UK Events workshop at Chislehurst Caves, on the 19th October 2010.

We wandered into the Caves and were each given an Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II with M.Zuiko Digital 12-40mm PRO Lens, and were shown how to drive the “Live Composite” feature.

As someone who light paints in one shot or by multiple exposures, this was really different for me.  In short, you set you camera up, focus, then hit the shutter.  The camera takes a 2 second “noise reduction” frame, and it’s then primed to start…  Hit the shutter again, start painting, and you can see the image appearing on the screen in real time, bit by bit.  It took me a while to get my head round this, as I’m so accustomed to painting, then running round back to the camera to see what I’ve got.

Thanks OlympusUK Events for putting on this workshop, as it not only provided the opportunity to try a new camera, but also meant I had the chance to recreate an image I had in mind “Soldier Ghosts Marching Home“.  Though I had to resort to using my own Canon 70D, as I’m familiar with it.  Read this post “The story behind my Favourite Light Painting image” to see the image and how it evolved

Some of these shots are me simply driving the camera, and other’s me painting.