Technique: Painting With Light - Combining Multiple Long Exposures

The image here is fairly simple, an industrial setting plus my friend's Darth Vader Build-a-Bear. I've used another interesting technique here called Light Painting*, though, which I hope you'll find illuminating.

Technique
This is a technique that will let you be more creative with how you light. It's easiest to do at nighttime, with little ambient light around.

In Light Painting, we take a series of long-exposure images, selectively lighting small portions of the scene in each. This lets us control the light in ways that would be far more difficult in a normal shot–even generating impossible lighting. Here, I used a simple flashlight, sweeping it back and forth over the area to light. Unfortunately, I don't have the intermediate images anymore, but in this case, you would see one image with just the ladder surrounded by darkness, another with just the blue pipes, etc. You can see that the ladder casts a shadow on the wall, but the railings don't.

It's easiest when there's no ambient lighting, otherwise your slow shutter speed will pick it up. A handy trick: if you're wearing dark colors and avoid getting caught in the light, you can walk right through the area you're lighting without appearing in the final image. This makes it easier to light precisely.

I'm planning to do more Light Painting in the coming weeks, and next time I'll make sure to show you the intermediate steps. If you're interested in trying the technique yourself, here's a tutorial I found online.

*Not to be confused with the other, also cool, Light Painting where you shine a flashlight directly into the camera.