Light Painting Portraits In Open Ateliers 2025 - Part One

Last weekend, the studios in Steinhagen opened their doors to visitors interested in art. This event takes place every other year in our community. I am a member of the CreARTiv group. The municipality provides us with rooms free of charge in a fire station building that has been converted into a cultural center, which we use as a studio. I had a large room on the second floor at my disposal for the event. In the run-up to the event, a press conference was held with all the participating artists groups and representatives of the local council to promote the event in the daily newspapers. The event was also advertised with posters and flyers in Steinhagen and the surrounding area. I would like to thank the municipality once again for this.

On Saturday, light painting artist Hans Roufflair helped me get my equipment to the venue and set it up. Later, he supported me in my work with the audience. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank him again.

We had darkened the windows and the floor with black cloth. We decorated the room with some light painting pictures. I had connected an Olympus OM-D E-M1 II with an Olympus M.ZUIKO 12 - 40mm f2.8 lens to a PC so that I could show the audience the performance on a monitor. The camera was set in LiveComposite 1.5s at ISO 200, aperture f11 during the entire session.

I had prepared some themes at home beforehand. So I spent an evening folding some origami doves, painting thin wire black and finally mounting the doves on the wire. I attached this to a tripod.
To turn one dove into a flock, I then brought the dove of peace into the picture several times by changing the position of the dove several times and then exposing it with the DIY scanner.

The whole thing ran under the motto, or rather, I advertised it under the motto: “Setting a sign for peace”. It was noticeable that female models always opted for this theme. Well, I think it's very important to promote peace again at the moment because the propaganda here in Germany is taking a very worrying direction.

I realized the second theme with the help of a crystal ball, which I illuminated with a flashlight and red color filter. In the cover picture, it hits the surprised victim's chest as a dangerous fireball. In the picture below, the model is juggling with the glowing red spheres.

After all, I had brought a “star stamp” with me from an older, never realized project. I finally wanted to put it to good use. You can see all the tools at the bottom of the post. I built this “stamp” from a small softbox covered with opaque paper into which I had previously cut out a star.
I illuminated the whole thing from behind with an RGB flashlight.

The test shot in the picture above worked quite well in terms of performance. I set the flashlight to momentary mode, pressed the button and simultaneously moved it with the screwed-on star stamp towards the model's hand. Once in this position, the star lingered at the target for a second before I switched off the flashlight.

Unfortunately, this didn't always work out as I had imagined. Repetitions were only possible in exceptional cases. The visitors were usually satisfied with the first results. But I don't want to withhold the pictures from you.

As usual, you can see the tools used in the last picture below. Since the stream of visitors didn't stop, especially on Sunday, a lot of pictures were taken, making today's post too long. So next week I will report again on the Open Studios in Steinhagen 2025. Stay tuned!

Light painting is a unique art form. As a rule, the darkness is illuminated by the artist with various light sources and traces of light are painted into the picture with various lighting tools. Various techniques are used, such as camera rotation or other movements of the camera during exposure. The creative possibilities are almost unlimited. When using ND filters, this technique can also be used in daylight. All images were taken during a single exposure. Apart from denoising, sharpening, cropping and possibly adjusting the white balance, the images are not processed on the computer.