Light Painting with iPhone
I discovered something new this past week. My local library did a virtual program about something called light painting, and it doesn’t require much—a camera and a flashlight at least. Oh, and total darkness (or as close as you can get). I was all set to use my DSLR and some flashlights we have around the house. I even ordered a set of colored gel film sheets to put over the flashlights in order to play with different colors. But then my husband had an idea that turned out to be absolutely brilliant. All we needed were phones!
We have iPhones, and John’s first idea was to use the Live Photo feature. I don’t know if you know this (I didn’t for a long time), but when you take a Live Photo there are different effects you can apply to it after the fact. When you’re looking at your photo in the Photos app, if you swipe up from the bottom you’ll see those effect options—Live, Loop, Bounce, and Long Exposure. Long Exposure is the one we were interested in for this project. We’ve gotten some amazing waterfall pictures using this effect, for example. For light painting, we were hoping that we’d see the light trails as we moved the flashlight around. As it turns out, we were on the right track, but we needed a little something extra that only another app could give us.
This is the best we were able to get with the light painting, though…
So John had another idea. For actually taking the photos, the Spectre photo app is very cool. It takes Live Photos, but instead of the usual three seconds you get from the built-in camera app, it takes up to nine seconds. It also has a light trail setting that makes all the difference in capturing every move you make.
Here’s what we got with Spectre. Pretty amazing, right?
Now check out those colors! I have no doubt that my original plan of using the gel films and flashlights would have yielded beautiful results, but there was no way to use one flashlight and get a bunch of colors at once (at least not with any flashlights we have). John happens to have a flashlight app on the app store—free and called Flashlight—and he built in all sorts of neat features, including a strobe feature and the ability to cycle through as many colors as you want.
If you’d like to try it out, first go HERE and download the app. After it has downloaded and you open it up, tap on the screen to bring up the settings and tap on Screens. Choose Add Screen, and then Smooth. You’ll see that you actually have two colors set up by default—white and black. Tap on each of those and move the color controls around until you have the colors you want. If you want more colors, tap Add a Color and add as many as you want! I should also note that if you want to just try it with one color, you can choose the Solid Color option from the Add a Screen menu and pick whatever color you want.
Once you have your colors chosen and your apps downloaded, make sure your phone is charged up! Leaving the screen on will drain your battery.
The person holding the phone should keep it very still. We did not pull out the tripod, but for part of the time we did hold the phone against the top of a chair for a little bit of extra stability. The person doing the “painting” can make whatever shape they want. Just make sure the phone is pointed towards the camera the whole time. If it takes less than nine seconds to draw what you want to “paint,” either stop the camera early or keep tracing over what you’ve already drawn. We got some extra colorful hearts doing that.
Admittedly I was more excited about this than the kids, but we enlisted their help, and the boys at least ended up having a lot of fun with it! I had a vision of getting a shot of each kid making a heart at the same time, so we pulled out every working phone we could find and got them all set up with Flashlight. They stood in a line and started drawing hearts over and over. I love that they each have their own style of drawing them. I may have to frame one of their creations.
Check out this video of some painting in action:
Eventually I’m going to pull out my DSLR and tripod and give light painting that way a try. This site has nice clear instructions: https://www.slrlounge.com/how-to-create-a-light-painting-in-3-easy-steps/ I think my kids will enjoy that as well. But I’m very excited about what we were able to accomplish with phones alone!
Enjoy!
