Evelyn has just about outgrown her bassinet, and for the last week or two I have been saying to Marci that I would like to take some pictures of her sleeping in it before it is time to move her to the crib. The problem is, how do you take a picture of a sleeping baby in pitch black? Using a flash would most likely wake her or lead to an unrealistic picture where things are over exposed, white, etc. The next option was low light and long exposures, which produced decent pictures, but they seemed “flat.” So what was the answer? Light Painting.
Light painting involves long exposures combined with a hand held light source. The end product can be dramatic and pronounced, or subtle and smooth… I chose the latter. To take this picture, I setup the camera on the tripod and manually adjusted focus before Evelyn was in the bassinet with ambient light. Once Marci had placed her in bed, the lights were turned off, the door was closed, and a 20 second exposure was started. As soon as the exposure started, I used a flashlight app on my phone set with a white bulb and pink background to quite literally “paint” the areas of the scene that I wanted to expose. The result was quite stunning and really caught Marci and I off guard. This technique is something that we watched the Buoys use on our engagement session and it was pretty neat to try it ourselves. This picture is exactly what I was looking to get before Evelyn moved to her crib, but I had no idea how to explain it. Super cool!