Light painting during Julie's DSLR Photography Lesson out at The Pier in St. Petersburg FloridaFor our third of four DSLR Photography Lessons I met Julie on a chilly St. Petersburg evening to practice long exposure and night photography. This type of shooting most definitely requires a tripod, and we pushed the legacy tripod Julie borrowed from her husband to its limits. We took the trolley out to The Pier, but first had a quick practice of on how to shoot abstract bokeh with her new 50mm lens.
Being a Monday night we basically had the entire Pier to ourselves, and especially so at my favorite water level spot upon a decaying concrete platform. Besides showing Julie how to make the usual long exposure shots of the St. Petersburg downtown skyline, we entered a kind of special effects world with light painting. For the above shot, I set my DSLR on my tripod with a 10 second shutter time. Using the LED light on the back of my iPhone 4 I "painted" from the tip of Julie's finger down onto the concrete. I did not astral project myself, I just moved quickly enough not to be fully exposed in the image.
We went on to practice light trail shots and a number of other things too. It was an action packed lesson for sure and Julie was great managing with an unfamiliar tripod and getting adept at changing the settings on her Canon 60D in the dark.
