Painting with Light

The GOAL of this assignment is to explore the beauty of night photography while testing your technical skills with camera settings, focus, and exposure. You will be capturing either a nature scene or an urban/suburban setting at night, experimenting with different techniques like long shutter speeds and sharp manual focus.

Assignment Instructions:

STEP 1: Choose a location

Nature Scene: You can shoot the stars, a forest at night, or a landscape with city lights in the background.
Urban/Suburban Scene: Try photographing streetlights, city buildings, or moving traffic, like light trails. You can also experiment with reflections in water or glass.

SAFETY FIRST!!! Make sure the location is safe and that you are visible to others. Never shoot in a place where you feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Consider wearing reflectors!

STEP 2: Camera Setup:

Tripod: Always use a tripod to keep the camera steady during long exposures. This helps avoid motion blur.
Manual Mode: Set your camera to manual mode to have full control over settings.
- - ISO: START with a low ISO (100-400) to avoid excessive noise. If the image is too dark, you can increase the ISO gradually, but try to avoid going too high.
  - Shutter Speed: Experiment with longer shutter speeds, such as 15-30 seconds or even BULB. Longer exposures capture more light and can create cool effects, like light trails or star trails!
    - - If you're trying to capture star trails, you'll want to keep your shutter open for a longer time (20 minutes or more).
        Tip: For star trails, be aware of the 500 rule—divide 500 by the focal length of your lens to calculate the maximum shutter speed before stars start to blur (e.g., if using a 20mm lens, 500 ÷ 20 = 25 seconds).
  - Aperture (f-stop): A medium aperture like f/8 to f/11 will give you a balanced depth of field, keeping both foreground and background in focus.
  - Manual Focus: Nighttime photography can make auto-focus unreliable, so always switch to manual focus. If you're capturing something like the stars, try focusing on a distant light or building first before you start your long exposure.
  - Optional: Shine a flashlight on an object in the scene to help you focus manually. This will allow the camera lens to clearly lock onto the object before you start the exposure.

ALWAYS take multiple shots because night photography will take some trial and error. Don’t be discouraged if your first shots aren't perfect!

STEP 3: Review Your Photos:

After capturing your shots, look at them on the camera’s screen to check the exposure, sharp focus, and composition.
- - Ensure that important details (such as lights or subjects) are sharp and clear and make sure that the image doesn't become overexposed despite its long shutter.

Overall, it's very important to set up your camera on a tripod and play with the focus and settings until you are happy with the results. This may take several tries, and that's OKAY!!!

What to submit:

Submit 2 to 4 of your best photos from this night shoot. Include a variety of scenes, such as close-ups, wide shots, and possibly some star trails (if you attempted them).

Please place them in a Google slideshow so I can see them in all their glory! Make sure to update the share settings and submit a link on Canvas.
For each photo, write a BRIEF description of the camera settings you used (ISO, shutter speed, aperture) and what techniques you tried to get the final result. This is important in case you end up using one of these in your SI.

Here are some examples of night photography.

S Frivold Copy of Phantom Images

This image was taken using a tripod, facing upward, with a long shutter.

This image was taken of a busy street at night using a tripod and long exposure.

This image was taken somewhere with many lights, NOT using a tripod, giving it that moved effect.

This image was taken with a tripod and long exposure. The light was painted in manual with a flashlight or laser.

Here are some examples of great photographers who use the night as their subject and/or setting:

TODD HIDO is a San Francisco based photographer who uses street lights and the SF fog to create moody nightscapes of the suburbs.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT!

CHRIS McCAW is also an SF based film photographer.

On a camping trip in Joshua Tree National Park, he set up his camera to take pictures at night. He fell asleep and when he woke up in the morning had a happy accident waiting for him in the camera!

The brightness of the moon burns a hole in the paper negative/ or film he uses! There are many reasons for this: the long exposure, the paper/ filmed used, the brightness of the moon. There is also the fact that he makes his own cameras and uses lenses that are used for aviation photography, that means they are very big and magnify the light! This shouldn't happen on a digital camera, although I believe this could burn out the digital sensor!!

EXTRA!

Re-do your painting with light assignment form last year.

Painting with light is really simple and really fun!!!

You will need:

tripod
camera
flashlight
darkroom/dark setting

Set your camera up on a tripod in a very dark room or outside at night.

You will need to play with your exposure, but I recommend using F/16 or F/22 and adjusting from there.

Your exposures will need to be at least 10-20 seconds if you want to draw or write something. You will need to adjust your settings manually until you happy with the result.

* NOTE if you write something, try to write it backwards so it appears correctly in-camera.

Turn off all the lights in the room except for your flashlight (I like the smartphone flashlight!)

Press the shutter release button...you now have time to draw with the flashlight FACING the camera.

Because the room is so dark, the flashlight is acting like a paint brush made of light. Anywhere it goes, it will make a line in the image.

Here are some examples of painting with light.

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