I bought a special RGB flash light from the US, which is the basis for many light painting additions you screw onto the flash light. Everything from various fiber brushes, to light sabers and different shapes (spikes, arrows, triangles etc) made out of clear plastic - which are part of the creative process in light paintings where you gradually can built up a fantasy figure or different types of patterns. Well, your mind is the limitation of what you can do. It is above all - about "painting with light" - which by the way the word Photography means.

To Paint With Light.

Now i haven't done anything special with the black light brushes - just tested them loosely and without any tripod. I feel that i have to learn a lot about these first - because otherwise, i fall back into the same effect, which then would be quickly boring. In the beginning everything is fascinating - but if the effect always results into the same... well, then it gets tedious.

The main photo shows one of the better first experiments i did the other day. It does look cool. However in my case, a weird effect occurs; i often get a super pronounced wrinkly neck - and on top, quite often a next which looks swollen... like a Turkey's neck.

Surely - i can take that away or make things look milder with retouch. So, it ain't a problem. Yet, i was puzzled that my neck always looks like that of a Turkey. I mean... it normally doesn't in daylight. Wrinkly at times yes, but not that much like in photos i made with the light painting brushes.

Of course, I am showing signs of age, in which my skin on the neck in certain positions looks wrinkly. That' about the only place this far in my life. And around the eyes I have notice that more than once. Especially in the corners, the camera seem to make it look much stronger compared to the visual impression. (Cameras also have a tendency to make people's slightly darker rings under their eyes look much darker compared to reality. Especially in Black & White, I have noticed)

Nevertheless - as "Rose" said when she was close to 100 years old, in the movie "Titanic (1997)" while she was looking at her image in an old mirror they pulled up from the Titanic;

"The reflection has changed a little..."

The Handling of the RGB torch

The "RGB Critter BT flashlight" from the Company "Ants on a Melon" (*LOL), is a bit weird.

Or better said, I am not yet familiar with it. It is also wired to an app in the iPhone, so there you can do a lot of settings. But there are also built-in settings. It's just i haven't figured out how to manage them. You know sometimes you wish to switch off the torch, and when you switch it on again, you would like that the color pattern stays the same. It appears to me, it reverts to the first out of 20 built-in settings, instead. So, all these little things I have to learn first.

Also; in order to make the brightness lower (going down to just 1% at the most) - I have to deal with the iPhone app. So, that it is a bit... well, I am divided about having to fiddle too much with an iPhone, when doing photography. Especially when it comes to light paintings, you don't have time to fiddle with an iPhone at or near the same time during different tasks.

What perhaps is unique (?), is that the torch is made of RGB - which means you can literally create any type of light color you want. Instead of putting colored filters in front, which is fiddly if you wish to change colors during camera exposure.

That's why I chose the RGB Critter BT flashlight from "Ants on a Melon". Gosh, what a name...

The torch is VERY bright

Even with the black fibers, which are then only illuminated at the end of each fiber - are very, very strong. So, I often find myself to reduce the light down to just 10 seconds - and still get relatively "short" exposure times and have to stop down the lens aperture to something like ƒ5.6

But - as i said - i need to do a lot more experiments. And the best thing is, if i am not the model, but somebody else. Using tripod, and then starting to experiment with exposure times, the effects on faces via the fibers, and perhaps at some later time, combine this with studio flash background projections (and then turning off the light, in order to make longtime exposure with the light brush).

Another way to go about would be, to use the special function in Olympus cameras. Here there is some function which allows you to expose an image for many minutes, without it ever gets over exposed. Only the highlights are registered in the image, but there is no shadow light accumulation, even if you expose for let's say 1 hour.

Not that I intend to exposure for one hours. However, I've never become a friend of that feature in Olympus cameras - and I am still pretty bad about the settings in that regard; the how to do.

The feature in Olympus / OM terms is called "Live Composition", with the "B" setting all the way to the end.

I bought three brushes

one is black, the other it a sort "salt & pepper" type, and the third is white. I wasn't so much interested in the by default colored light painting fiber brushes. So, i skipped those. I could in the future think of perhaps adding a saber - in which the illuminated saber acts like a light sword, with which you can paint patterns and shapes "in the air".