Long Exposure, Multi-Flash

Another technique to capture motion!

So now we paint with bursts of light.  This is a single frame of just two dancers.  A tripod is a must – set it up and pre-focus, then turn out the lights and leave the shutter open for eight seconds. A burst of a flash from a speedlight was manually triggered five times to freeze the dancers in motion. This was done at a workshop hosted by our light-painting fanatic friend, Charles.

So of course, Jim and I had to try this at home.  This was done with a Canon Speedlight set in multi-mode, which means it was pre-set to fire five bursts per second for three seconds. This is fifteen bursts of light on a single image.

This one worked a bit better. We lowered the number of flash bursts from fifteen down to nine – a bit less jumbled.

Here are a few more. We did have a lot of outtakes – many of the images looked like a jumbled mess. It took some practice to create movement that worked, and to determine how many bursts of light worked best.

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