Almost every photographer has tried light painting at some point. Long exposures, running around with a flashlight or string of lights is great fun, but we usually don’t expect much from the resulting photos. They’re just light trails. But with some patience and creativity, this technique can be used to create stunning works of art, including light-painted portraits.  

Light painting, also known as luminography, can be defined as painting with light. It's a creative photography technique where you use a light source and long exposures to create abstract images, light portraits, futuristic cityscapes, and more. Creativity knows no bounds!

You have chosen the right location, kept an eye on the weather, planned the perfect composition, and have experience shooting and stacking hundreds of night sky images for the result to be effective. However, at home, you may discover after it’s all done that something didn’t go according to plan. Luckily, you still have post-processing to work magic on these images. For me, these unexpected issues cost me almost two hours of post-processing.

Landscape photography is a genre where long exposures can be a good thing. They let you get motion into a photo, in the form of blurred water, clouds, grass, and leaves on trees.

Surely you’ve seen a photo like this before—a night view of a big road in the city, full of light trails from passing cars. It looks like a very long exposure was used. But was it? There’s an alternative approach you can take that gives better control over the results.