Light Painting with a BMW

Light painting is fun.

If you’ve never tried it before, go try it. You won’t regret it. All you need is a tripod, a camera that can take slow shutter pictures and a strong, mobile light source. Even a flashlight works

For this shot I used the LedGo CN-B150 portable video light.

Here’s the shot at ambient light conditions, you can see the kind of light I’m working with:

Settings:
ISO 1000, f1.8, 1/20

The Shot

The goal was to show a bit of the background, to lend some context to the picture, but to make sure that the car really stood out.

First things first: Bring ISO down to 100 to get the best quality of picture and to darken the image.

Next I had to figure out how much time was needed to “paint” all the way around the car. After some spectacular failures at shorter shutter speeds, I settled on 15 seconds.

With ISO and shutter speed set, an aperture of f8.0 that gave me a good, dark exposure.

Last but not least, we parked a truck directly behind the car so that the truck’s headlights gave us a rimlight. I’m not sure if I would do this again, since it also lit up some smudges on the windows which I had to fix up in post processing.

One fun part about light painting is that you can make your light source stronger or weaker with your in-camera settings. A higher ISO or wider aperture will effectively boost the strength of your light.

When I paint the car with light I’m using my body and coat to shield the light from the camera, otherwise there would be streaks of light in the air all around the car.

Settings:
ISO 100
f8.0
15”

The Edit

The final shot didn’t require much for exposure tweaks. After a simple crop to help with the composition, the car got a boost in clarity, sharpening, saturation and vibrance to help it pop.

I also used a gentle vignette and some graduated filters to darken the edges of the image and hide some distractions.

To really bring out the yellow colour, I pulled back the competiting colours in the image wiht Lightroom’s colour-specific saturation sliders. I killed all the green and strongly reduced the blue, which really simplified the image.

This picture got some fairly aggressive spot removal treatment. There are a bunch of little distractions, like details on windows of the car, in the background of the image and the license plate. Fortunately these can be dealt with easily enough in Photoshop.

And here’s the final image: