Photography Tips & Tricks

Therein light painting tutorial My goal is to teach you ways to require much time exposure photographs of water drops over a psychedelic colorful reflective CD surface which has a Mini Maglite flashlight.

Equipment

I'm using a water dropper, a M2A016 Mini Maglite Flashlight, a typical CD, a Nikon D300s DSLR, a Manfrotto 055XPROB Tripod, and many color gels. Furthermore used an ND8 Filter so I might use an aperture of F11. The gels and ND8 filter are optional.

Camera Settings

I was using these settings:
Shutter Speed: 5-60 seconds
Aperture: f11
ISO: 100 (or "Low 1.0")
White Balance: "Incandescent" for correct color, or "Auto" for warmer colors

Instructions

Consider the water dropper and put a number of droplets within the CD once you've wear it a table of your choice. The table I used to be using would have been a clothes hamper with a thin black blanket ostentatious. Fancy!

Next, put your DSLR using a tripod and set it right up near to the CD. I'd been using manual mode with manual focus most of the time (but is not always, a great deal of DSLR cameras have an AF Assist Lamp within the front from the camera that can help focus in the dark, in situations just as this!)

In order to get my aperture to f11, I'd been utilizing a simple ND8 filter before my lens. This is not necessary, I just wanted my photos really sharp, and f11 could be the sharpest i'm all over this my lens. You possibly can drop by f22 or smaller and skip using the filter if you want. Just make use of the highest f number you'll be able to plus the lowest ISO number possible. It will limit the amount of light coming in contact with the digital camera sensor, which can be what you look for with this situation. Maglites are bright!

Tips

Try making different patterns around the CD while using the Maglite flashlight. Quite a cool someone to do is usually to squeeze light level while using the CD close to the table. This creates the best circular reflection inside the circular water drops within the circular CD! Awesome.

Try pointing the sunshine diagonally concerning the CD, and just try different directions and distances away from the CD. You're sure to get a cool shot.

In order to aid me know that I purchase the psychedelic rainbow colors for the reflective CD surface, I Temporarily widened the aperture on my lens to f3.5 then went into Live-View Mode. This will make it easy to find out exactly what the camera sees, so that you understand what direction to aim the sunshine to have colorful rainbow effect. Once you begin to see the rainbow effect show up on the CD within your viewfinder or even in Live-View mode, get rid of live view mode, go back to smaller aperture that you were using before, after which take yo' picture.


And remember, if you are into this type of photography, you'll love my Trick Photography and Special Effects e-book (and soon to be DVD / online video course).