Long exposure photography is a technique that is widely utilized across many genres. Some of these genres include, but are not limited to, landscape, street and surrealist photography. By understanding light and manipulating your shutter speed, you can create incredible light trails, surreal water flow, and gorgeous night sky images. These styles have seen a recent resurgence on Instagram, as I am sure you’ve noticed.
Vitor Schietti is a master at his craft. His unique artistic process has landed him on the cover of many magazines and with many corresponding awards. In this video, he shares with us both the technical knowledge of light painting as well as how to combine other techniques to create your own style. On that note, I would like to reiterate one important point he makes. Practice!
When you are trying out new things, it is always best to perform multiple tests. If you are planning on using sparklers to paint a tree with light (like Vitor), definitely practice on some plastic trees first. We wouldn’t want to set any forests on fire. That is definitely not the type of publicity you are after… hopefully.
His use of ND filters and some of the more technical aspects of his workflow were very insightful. There are also various technical difficulties with blending multiple images of this nature in Photoshop. His run-through of the blending methods and mask usage, while brief, proved very useful. If you would like additional information on the Photoshop aspect, let me know in the comments below and I can create a tutorial for you.
I hope you have a chance to watch the video to get the full rundown of the technique as well as the insight to create your own style.