The photo challenge for this month is….Light painting (check out the challenge page here)!

No, light-painting isn’t the failed attempts at watercolors by John…

Light painting is where you take a long exposure in a dark place and use a light source to selectively light the scene. here’s an example of one I did for the 30-day challenge:

I simply put my Manfrotto tripod-mounted Nikon D70 camera in manual-mode (I think it was a 20-second exposure, more or less), set the self timer to go off in 10-seconds to give me some time to get to my photo-set, and painted the outline of the man-in-the-chair with my trusty Popular Science free flashlight (limited time offer!!).

Mike also had a tutorial about doing it at his blog here.

It’s a lot of fun to experiment and get some neat effects. Light painting can also be where you take a large scene, like Bob Krist did in this month’s Outdoor Photographer and do multiple flash pops to illuminte the entire scene. It’s a good way to get large scale illumination (of things like Stonehenge for example) without having to rent a generator truck and some klieg-lights.

So, even though my stuff is all in storage and the house is on the market, I think I’ll dig out my flashlight and give it a go.

Come and join the fun with us!