A dentist by profession, the 26-year-old Ben Matthews, the artist from
The artist shares secrets:
In order to do light graffiti you don’t need a highly professional camera, an ordinary snapshot one will do. The main thing is that it should have a manual shooting mode: it is a crucial condition, since in order to light-draw you will need to use three main parameters: exposure, photosensitivity and the stop.
In this case, exposure implies the time which the photographer has for painting a picture in the air using device which is lit. While the camera's shutter is open, the light falls on the matrix and with the light source moving, the light turns into a line on the captured image. Naturally, one needs time in order to obtain such lines.
Therefore, ensuring long exposure which lasts at least five seconds is the most important thing in light graffiti. That is enough to draw a symbol or a letter. For more complex tasks a longer exposure is required, for example, lasting 30 seconds. However, this can cause occurrence of the so-called digital noise.
To avoid this unpleasant effect, you will need to reduce the photosensitivity to 50-100. By using the stop you can adjust the amount of light falling on the matrix. The higher the value, the less the light, and the lower the value, the more the light.
One of the main conditions for the photographer, who decided to do light graffiti, is effective fixation of the camera. A small gust of wind or even the photographer’s breath can nullify all the work. It is best to put the camera on a tripod.
If a tripod is unavailable, any hard surface will do: a bench, a stone parapet, a table. It is also better to select the photo object in daytime, because it's easier to find a place for installing the camera.
Well, further all you have to do is just to wait for nightfall, because light absorption can take place only at night.
By the way, the night will bring another trouble, unnoticeable at daytime. The matter is that while light drawing, any extra light sources such as sky lanterns, windows, car lights are extremely undesirable. Brightness given by these sources is close to that which will be provided by the sources used for drawing or can even exceed it, and in this case you will just fail to draw the picture, because the light you need will merge with the city light.
By the way, the range of colours used by freezelighters is somewhat limited. Freezelighters can only use red, yellow, green, blue, purple, orange and white.
For light drawing almost any luminous object will do, such as: a flashlight, a light diode, a lighter, a burning candle, a sparkler and even a mobile phone – the most important is that the object emits bright light.
You can light draw using even an ordinary one-diode flashlight: it will do for obtaining a simple and a non-intricate shot. In order to obtain unique images showing traces of multicoloured, fiery, or multi-layer light you need to use more sophisticated devices.
You can simplify the drawing process in several ways. First, you need to draw on paper the picture which would then be drawn in the air. This will help holding the image in your mind. Secondly, as children we all used to draw on the pavement with chalk – you can recall this skill. Draw on the pavement and walls in daytime, and draw in the air at night.
Dressed in dark clothes, a freezelighter can come very close to the object of drawing: the long exposure will contribute to this. But if the photographer stands still for a moment, then his face will be captured on the photo as well. By adjusting the light intensity you can make the light drawn object look clear-shaped, or vice versa. On the whole, the main thing in the art of light graffiti is to be not afraid to experiment.
