Light paintings with holiday lights

Enlighten yourself with your camera

Here is a fun way to amuse yourself during the holiday season. Get your digital camera out and go play in the dark with the pretty lights. I call these exposures light paintings because I’m making art with lights.

The procedure is pretty simple. At night, point your camera at some brightly colored holiday lights. The new vivid LED lights are particularly good for this. Press the shutter, and while the picture is exposing, move the camera around. Pan it, tilt it, even wiggle and jiggle it. This action will blur and streak the lights.

You can of course experiment with different camera settings, but I find the ubiquitous program mode to be just fine. It’s pretty hard to predict what you’ll get, so take lots of photos and try lots of camera movement techniques. Even if you can see the results on your camera’s LCD, you won’t really know the full extent of what you got until you download the photos to your computer. So keep snapping!