Light painting with cars is something I’ve wanted to try for a while. Unfortunately, I drive a Honda Civic.

Yes, it’s a reliable car and I enjoy driving it. But I’ve found that no matter what angle I snap a picture from, it doesn’t exactly give that “wow” effect I’m looking for.

Fortunately I got the opportunity to take some pics with this Audi when doing some photos in the Uroperformance car shop in Orangeville.

Here’s the result of about 10 minutes of playing around:

Before you point it out, yes, the car isn’t 100% shiny clean. This was just the practice session. There’s more to come in the future.

For those who haven’t tried it before, light painting is deceptively simple. Since the camera records only the light that it “sees”, you can walk around the car holding the light in front of you and be completely invisible. When making the picture, you a bit in the dark (horrible pun count: 1) as to what the finished image is going to look like. It’s quite fun getting back to the LCD screen to see the results.

There are some cool lights available to make the job easy, like the Icelight, but in this case we just used a worklight that was in the shop.

The camera was on a tripod with the shutter set to 25 seconds, giving me enough time to walk around the vehicle with the light. I tried hiding the light from the camera on a couple shots, to avoid getting that streak of light around the vehicle, but since vehicle work lights really aren’t the best tool for the job it was easier just to keep it as an element of the picture.

Out of the camera, the shot was fairly clean already:

The first step in Lightroom was a crop and some colouring. I added blue heavily into the shadows in the edit to give the picture a cold and metallic feel, and also pumped the clarity to make every bit of detail really come into focus (and then I lost that detail again when optimizing the picture for use online – check it out instead here on 500px). Lastly, spot removal got rid of some of the bothersome details like stuff on the floor and walls that we didn’t take the time to remove.

If you’ve never tried light painting before, give it a shot. It’s easy, it’s fun, and you’ll like the results.

Unless you have an intense fear of the dark. Then this might not be for you.