Learn how to create spectacular photos with the light brush technique! The OPEN FOTO master class will take place on January 26, 2019 at the VDNH Crafts Library.
The "light brush" technique produces an unusual light pattern that cannot be obtained using other shooting methods. A light brush is a point beam of light that the photographer controls during shooting to highlight the objects he needs in the frame and place accents in the picture as the idea requires. The light brush is primarily used for still life and product photography.
This technique is available to everyone. To take a photo using the light brush technique, you will need a camera that has a manual (manual) shooting mode, a tripod and a flashlight. Of course, there are specialized devices - professional light brushes, which are very expensive. But, believe me, a flashlight will allow you to achieve an amazing effect. And how much pleasure the process of shooting brings!
The program of the practical master class "The ordinary miracle of photography, or the Light brush"
- The basic principles of creating photographs using the "light brush" technique.
- Demonstration of the technology of the process of creating such images.
- Analysis of common errors.
- How to do without a tripod when shooting using the “light brush” technique if you don’t have one.
- How to use the light brush for technical shooting of the "subject" in cases where other methods of shooting are too complicated.
- Practice shooting using the "light brush" technique in the studio.
To participate in the practical part of the master class, you must bring with you:
- camera,
- tripod,
- a flashlight (if you don't have a flashlight, a flashlight built into your smartphone will do; this is less convenient, but possible),
- a few small items that you will shoot; you can compose a composition from them or shoot each separately - at your discretion.
The master class is held as part of the VDNH Winter Educational Program.
Master class date: January 26, 2019.
Start: at 18.00.
Duration: 3 hours.
Location: VDNKh Crafts Library (119 Mira Ave., building 47, pavilion 47 - House of Crafts).
Author and presenter of the master class:, founder of the OPEN FOTO School of Photography.
Library of crafts on the map of VDNKh
Registration for the master class is closed. We invite you to the upcoming events of the OPEN FOTO School of Photography!
If you have any questions, please contact e-mail or by phone +7 977 835-93-53.
All photos in this article were created using the "light brush" technique. The author of the photographs is , the founder of the OPEN FOTO School of Photography.
Light graphics or photography using the "light brush" technique is attractive because it does not require expensive studio lighting to create interesting, beautiful pictures. All you need to work is a camera, a tripod and a small flashlight, which can be easily turned into a light brush with simple manipulations and improvements.
In essence, photography in the “light brush” technique is a drawing with light. A directed beam of light highlights that part or details of the composition that you want to get in the future picture. Each subject is illuminated separately, and the light source moves during the exposure. The background remains dark, the objects seem to be illuminated from different sides, and it is completely incomprehensible to the uninitiated person where the light falls from. The shooting technique is simple, but it is very important not to overdo it with lighting - if the subject is illuminated for a long time, the picture will lose its mystery, it will look like when illuminated with ordinary light.
How to make a light brush?
A professional light brush is very expensive, so most photographers use a regular flashlight, and in order for it to give a narrow beam of light, they put a tube or cone on it. The main requirements for a homemade light brush are natural color temperature, a narrow beam, and uniformity of the light beam. However, there are no hard and fast rules regarding color temperature - flashlights with warm light are even better, and the high color temperature that LED flashlights give can be corrected with white balance, corrected in Photoshop, or put a light filter on the flashlight.
The simplest light brush can be made from plain thick paper. On one side, foil is glued on it, on the other - black matte or velvet paper. We glue one of the sides of the sheet by 3-4 cm with black electrical tape (we glue it on the foil). The cone is folded with foil inward, the darkened side is its narrow part. The cone is mounted on the lantern, attached to the lantern with black electrical tape. A 10 mm hole is made in the narrow side (which is pasted over with electrical tape). diameter.
Shooting technique.
The basis is long exposure. The camera is mounted on a tripod, exposure is set from 4 to 30 seconds, but as a rule, photographers work within 8-15 seconds. If the shutter speed is longer, noise is added. The aperture is selected empirically, if the flashlight is not very powerful, then F-5, F-7 will do. After a couple of trial shots, it will be possible to set it more accurately. It is better to focus in manual mode, if autofocus is used, then after focusing the camera must be switched to manual mode. When the preparation is completed, the light is turned off and the work with the light brush begins.
When illuminating the composition, you can adhere to the following algorithm: First, for 1-2 seconds. general illumination of the composition is given. Then 1-2 sec. the objects themselves are highlighted - along the contour and pointwise. After that, you can highlight objects that look spectacular when illuminated "through the light". The work is completed by highlighting the background (when necessary). If you have already covered everything, and the shutter has not yet fired, turn off the flashlight, otherwise the lighting will even out, the frame will turn out to be flat, uninteresting. Make sure that the flashlight does not shine in the direction of the lens - there will be stripes in the frame that will have to be removed in Photoshop.
Shooting features.
Try not to shine on the glass, it almost always results in stripes, and the light that it reflects will illuminate your hand and stains will be visible in the frame. It is advisable to work in dark clothes and put on a black glove on your hand - it will absorb the light reflected by objects. It is better to shoot at night to exclude light, and for the convenience of working in the far corner, you can light a small candle or leave the door ajar.
Among photographers, the photography technique with the “light brush” tool (or sometimes they say “light graphics”) is of great interest - this is a rare and unusual shooting technique. It consists in highlighting with a beam of light exactly those details of our composition that we want to get in the future image. Today we will consider: how you can make a simple “light brush” for this technique with your own hands.
Making a Light Brush
First you need to make the "Light brush" itself. The entire manufacturing process took only 15-20 minutes.
As a light source, I personally used a flashlight "Bright Beam". Of course, you can use another flashlight.
To reduce the angle of the beam of light, I used a cardboard frame from a toilet paper roll. He tightly dressed on the reflector of this brand of flashlight.
We tightly insert tubes from a cocktail 6 cm long into it. We got a neat honeycomb nozzle on a flashlight to reduce light scattering.
The spot of light at a distance of 1 meter from the flashlight became 10 cm, at a distance of 50 cm - 6 cm - for my purposes it was quite acceptable. Photo of a ready-to-use "light brush" design.
Photos taken with the "light brush"
A little about the intricacies of this lighting technique
Now we take our light source with a light spot and draw with it whatever and how we want. I would like to say about several pitfalls in this technology. Lack of simultaneous lighting for the entire object. We usually shoot when the light illuminating an object hits it from different directions, creating light pattern, contrast, tonal nuances, etc. and we see all this luminous flux at the same time. We can compare the different brightnesses of the object being photographed and its parts visually, without the help of a light meter. This is how lighting is built on the object itself, and the background lighting is also built. Exposure to some extent acts as an auxiliary factor: the main thing is to keep within the known breadth of photographic material and exposure measurements follow towards the end of the shooting process, when the light-plastic pattern of the image has already taken place.
In the light brush technique, exposure metering follows much earlier than the actual shooting process. There is a simple technique for such shooting, where at the very beginning, after the compositional construction of a still life, they begin to make a sketch and calculate the exposure.
We need a sketch, a simple pencil contour sketch of the shooting plot, where, by outlining the contours, we separate objects from each other. But it's in the picture. In photography, there is no concept of a line, but there is a zone of separation of two tones, which can be perceived (and is perceived) as a line, as a contour of an object.
In this sketch, with the help of hatching, we are trying to draw intersecting and overlapping contours of objects, replacing the line with tonality, somewhere shading more, somewhere less, trying to convey volume in tone, or at least simply not allowing the same tones to be obtained in neighboring areas objects, not allowing them to merge in tone. That is, we, thus, are already laying down different exposures for different parts of the object. To draw the faces of our cube, we will have to make three different exposures for three different faces of the object. Let's say we want to create the maximum contrast between the light and dark edges of 1:4. The light flux falling on the left side, we will conditionally take as 100%. To separate the right edge, we have to reduce the exposure, and in our case it will be 25% with a given contrast of 1:4. The exposure compensation will be -2 EV, that is, the light will weaken four times from the norm. The upper part of the cube is located between the light and dark tones of the right and left sides of the cube. To make it readable, it must be darker than the light left side and lighter than the dark right. Again a decrease in exposure in relation to the norm, but by a smaller amount: 50% of the main exposure will be a correction of -1 EV. We can make an unexpected conclusion that when working with a light brush, the tonality of various parts of the subject directly depends on the exposure. But this conclusion seems unexpected only at first glance - we got this dependence during normal shooting, but we didn’t realize it.
As you know, the word “photography” means “drawing with light”. The light brush gives this word a literal meaning.
A light brush is a tool and a photography technique in which this tool is used. The instrument is a small constant light source that produces a well focused narrow beam. The shooting technique is that each object is illuminated separately, “drawing” on the photograph with a moving light brush. The result is a unique light pattern that cannot be reproduced in other ways.
The professional light brush has a constant color temperature of around 5500K and allows you to use a variety of attachments and filters. Light of a strictly specified color temperature, corresponding to daylight or flash light, allows you to shoot with such a light brush on film without color-correcting filters. Attachments expand the capabilities of the tool, giving the photographer additional visual possibilities.
But a professional light brush is an expensive device. When shooting on digital camera color temperature is not of fundamental importance, and nozzles are not always useful. Therefore, a simple flashlight can be used as a light brush for fact-finding and educational purposes. It is desirable that with this flashlight the light is focused by a lens, then the spot of light will not be too wide, and you will be able to accurately illuminate small objects. It is best to use a white LED flashlight as the light source. Its light almost exactly matches the daylight color temperature, and it is very economical on battery power.
WHAT IS NECESSARY
Shooting with a light brush is not as difficult as it might seem. If you do not have the skills of such shooting, then you will need a digital camera. It will give you the opportunity to immediately view the result and adjust your actions. It is very important to carefully review each frame immediately after shooting, while you still remember exactly the order of your actions with the light brush. The small display of the camera is not enough to study all the details of the photo, so it is advisable to connect the camera to a computer and take pictures with the image automatically displayed on the monitor. All DSLRs and many compact digital cameras have this capability. This requires the camera to have a connector for connecting to a computer (usually USB, sometimes FireWire) and a special program, which is most often included in the kit. If you do not have such an opportunity, then it is recommended to shoot in small series with control on the camera's display, and then transfer them to a computer for a more detailed study.
If you do not have a cable release (remote) for the camera, then use the timer delay release mode. If there is, then set the manual shutter speed control mode (Bulb), and on the remote control, use the shutter button lock for the shutter speed. There are remotes with their own timer (for example, the Canon TC-80N3), which allow you to set the long exposure time and work it out automatically.
What to do if the maximum shutter speed of your camera is not enough to realize the idea, there is no cable release and there is no way to set the desired shutter speed in the program that controls shooting from the computer? In this case, you can take a photo in several exposures, and then combine the frames into one using a graphic editor.
Set the camera on a tripod, turn on the manual shooting mode. Point and focus the lens. If you used autofocus, turn it off. Turn off bright lights. Leave it low enough to clearly see the subject you are photographing. If you are shooting an object with a smooth, shiny surface, such as glass or metal, then try to remove or cover any objects with glare surfaces that are nearby - they can be hit by the light from the light brush, and you will get their reflections in the photo.
SHOOTING
When working with a light brush, the exposure has to be selected experimentally. Set the aperture based on the depth of field you need. A shutter speed of 1 minute will be enough to illuminate a small object or a composition of several objects. To avoid noise on such long exposure, use a low sensitivity such as 100 ISO. If during the shooting you find that the shutter speed is not enough to create the planned light pattern, or, conversely, it is too long - adjust it as you need.
The principle of creating lighting is simple. First you need to highlight the desired fragments of the object. What you want to make brighter, light longer. If you need a bright spot of light with small dimensions and sharp edges, then hold the light brush closer to the object. On the contrary, if you want a blurry soft spot, then hold the light brush further. At the end of the exposure, give some fill light - move in an imaginary hemisphere over the object at such a distance that the entire object falls into the spot of light. You can just hold the light brush at such a distance motionless - then you get the shadows. You can also create a backlight - illuminate the object from the back, then the light will clearly outline the contours.
It should be especially noted that before opening the camera shutter, it is necessary to clearly imagine future photo. This is generally a useful habit, and when shooting with a light brush, it is simply necessary. You must decide what and how you want to light, and imagine how to do it. For convenience, you can sketch out a sketch of a future photo and designate on it a scheme for the movement of a light brush with the duration of illumination in each area. When shooting, it will be much easier for you to accurately work out all the movements according to this scheme and with a stopwatch in your hands than from memory and guided by an internal sense of time. In addition, you will not forget anything and make fewer takes.
Tricks
An interesting effect is the use of two different flashlights: LED and incandescent. An incandescent lamp gives light with a low color temperature (in other words, yellow). There are flashlights with a halogen bulb, their light has a higher color temperature (such flashlights are produced under the well-known brands Phillips, Energizer, etc.). The light of a flashlight on a white LED is almost indistinguishable from daylight. If you set the white balance on the camera (or for an already prepared picture, in a graphic editor) to an intermediate value between incandescent light (about 2800 K) and daylight (5500 K), then in the picture you will get a light pattern with a combination of yellow and blue colors . This combination looks beautiful because blue and yellow are complementary colors.
Instead of flashlights with different types of light sources, you can simply use filters. Then you will not be limited to only yellow and blue colors, but will be able to choose almost any color combination.
Color filters for lenses can be used as light filters. For example, red, orange, green and others. You can use a colored polymer film. Such a film is used as a light filter for studio lighting sources, as well as for design purposes. You can look for it in art supply stores, stationery stores, and packaging departments. A piece of unexposed and developed color film can also be used as a color filter, producing a pleasing amber light.
Separately, it is worth mentioning the shooting of objects with glare surfaces. In photographs of such objects, glare must be mandatory, because otherwise their surface will lose its shape and be lifeless black. But glare easily gives overexposure in the picture. To avoid this, light up shiny surfaces by brushing the beam of the light brush over them non-stop. In order for the reflection of the light source to hit the picture, remember that the angle of incidence of the beam on the surface is equal to the angle of reflection. To simplify the task, you can use the technique described above - to remove glare with a separate exposure and combine frames in a graphic editor.
Shooting with a light brush is a complex and exciting process. Not everything will work right away. Be patient - the first few shots will almost certainly fail. Carefully examining each frame, try to understand the cause of the errors and try to correct them the next time you try. As a result, the result will be better and better.
Not many people know that the word “photography” means “drawing with light”. Using the light brush makes this expression literal.
The light brush is a tool that has a small size and can emit a constant beam of light with a sharp focus. The technique of photography is to transfer the image outlined by light in the picture.
The professional grade light brush has a light temperature of 5500 Kelvin. It allows you to use various attachments. The light of this brush corresponds to flash light or daylight. Nozzles and filters give extra space for creativity.
A professional light brush is not cheap. In addition, for digital photography, the temperature of light does not matter as much as for film. Nozzles and filters are not used very often. That is why you can use a regular flashlight for familiarization. The main thing is that the spot of light from the flashlight should not be too wide. This will allow you to clearly outline objects. Flashlights with white LEDs are best suited.
How to start photography
The best way to shoot is with a digital camera. It allows you to view the result after each shot. On a small display, it is difficult to see the details, so it is better to immediately connect the camera to a computer. Almost all DSLRs and many compacts can output images directly to a computer monitor. After each frame, you should carefully study the picture and, if necessary, make corrections. If it is not possible to view each frame, then you should make short series and view several frames, studying them in detail.
Photographs should be taken at slow shutter speeds using a cable release or remote control. This will prevent the camera from shaking from pressing the shutter button. In the absence of such a possibility to control the camera, you should use the timer shutter release.
Sometimes it happens that the camera does not have the ability to shoot with a sufficiently slow shutter speed, which is necessary to create a normal frame. In this case, you can take several photos with different exposures and then combine them in a graphics editor.
How to take photos with a light brush? After setting the camera on a tripod, you should switch it to manual mode. Autofocus should be turned off. Manually focus. Turn off bright lights. If the subject has a reflective surface, keep other objects away from the subject as they may be reflected.
Light Brush Shooting Technique
When working with a light brush, the exposure has to be selected experimentally. The aperture is set so as to obtain sufficient depth of field. In most cases, a 1 minute exposure is sufficient. To prevent the appearance of noise, it is better to set the photosensitivity smaller. after the first frame, it will be possible to determine the shutter speed adjustment. It sometimes needs to be reduced or increased.
To illuminate an object, you should know some rules. You can highlight an object with light by holding a beam of light on it. To get a clear and bright spot of light, you need to shine from a closer distance. To get a more blurred spot of a large size, you need to highlight from a farther distance. At the very end, you should fill the scene with light a little. This can be done by highlighting the picture from such a distance that the beam of light illuminates the entire frame. If at the same time move the brush in a circle, the shadows will turn out blurry or will be absent altogether. To obtain clear shadows, the brush must be held motionless for some time. You can also make backlighting at the end with a backlight from behind. This will make the outlines clearer.
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When shooting with a light brush, you need to learn one rule. Before releasing the shutter, you need to clearly imagine the future photo. This habit will help not only when shooting with a light brush. Even before shooting, you need to clearly imagine what and how will be illuminated. You can even draw a lighting scheme on paper and indicate the duration of the brush delay at each point. According to this scheme, it is much easier to draw with a stopwatch.
Tricks when shooting with a light brush
A very interesting effect can be obtained using two different light brushes. One should be with an LED, and the second with an incandescent lamp. As you know, an incandescent lamp has a yellowish light. So by setting the white balance to between incandescent (2800K) and daylight (5500K), the photo will have yellow and bluish spots of light, which looks very nice. As you know, yellow and blue are complementary colors.
Using filters for a light brush, you can make drawings of various colors. not limited to yellow and blue.
Light filters can be made from almost anything. These can be filters from lenses, color polymer film, which is used as a filter for studio light and for interior decoration. It can be found in craft stores and stationery stores. Unnoticed photographic film produces a pleasant amber light. It can also be used.
Separately, it should be said about shooting objects with a glare surface. Glare on such objects must be, because they convey the main form. But it is very important to remember that glare often makes overexposure, so you need to spend on such objects without delaying a beam of light on them. In addition, you need to remember the rule that the angle of incidence of the beam is equal to the angle of reflection. Make sure that the reflected light does not hit the lens with direct rays. You can do it differently. Shoot the scene with almost no glare and overlay them separately in Photoshop.
Photographing with a light brush is not an easy process, but the results can be amazing. Everything will not work out right away, so you need to be patient. Carefully study the shots taken, find errors and correct them. This is the way to get great results.