Give People An Aura Using Light Painting

See that nice aura on the picture to the left? No… it was not taken using the new generation of psychic point and shoot, not is it the result of using high def video capture.

This image was made using long exposure light paint and a simple accessory. (If you have no clue what light painting is, click here for DIYP’s entire folder of  light painting tutorials)

In this short and sweet tutorial, Renard Nicolas is going to explain how to achieve this effect.

You would need two bits of equipments to make this happen (not counting a camera, tripod and so on…): a light source and something to make the diffusing saber.

• For light source, try a flashlight, LED or a LED lamp that lets you choose a color. Those can be found pretty cheap on Amazon.

• For the nice sabery diffusion thing, a stretch pipe insulation will work great. Make sure you get a thin transparent one. (It is the same material we used way back to absorb vibration while shooting from cars.)
  You can also find this kind of tube with colored LEDs inside in game/funny stores for about 2.50 €. (In this case remove the present system in it).

Then the principle is simple fitting your Torch or LED in one of the end of the tube and close the other.

Alternatively, you can build a light saber and heavily wrap it for diffusion.

Once you have the “ingredients”, find a dark location and set your camera and tripod as with any light painting image.

As always, the idea is to get long exposure, so you would set your camera to either its longer exposure or to bulb, and change ISO and aperture to compensate for light intensity coming from the light tube.

In practice, once you are set up and exposure is running, simply move the tube and create the shapes you want.

In the image above (and bigger below), Nicholas slowly moved the tube around a person while the tube was semi pointing to the camera.

While this can be done with any LED flash light, there is a specific reason we recommended the lights that can change color. Shifting color while in movement is way (WAY) nicer than having to stop and go fetch another light.

If you are doing anything like this, share with us on the comments.