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Painting with Laser Light

These images were are all made as an in-camera effect. I had my wife Christie (row 1), and another model Ashley (rows 2+), pose for around 15 seconds at a time while I moved a laser across her to form the red lines. We spent about a half hour trying out variations of angles and laser movements. My favorite method ended up being vertical stripes from a 45 degree angle, followed by horizontal stripes from an opposite 45 degree angle. This created a criss-cross style that produced immediately recognizable images.

If you wish to recreate this type of image, begin by first getting the room that you are shooting in as dark as possible. Any light bleeding into the room will show up on longer exposures. Next you will need to lower your ISO to something like 100. The lower the ISO, the less noise will be in the image. Then set your lens aperture to a level that your lens can capture a sharp image at. This might be somewhere between f/8 to f/12. Finally, set the knob at the top of your camera to B for “Bulb” mode. This tells your camera to open up the shutter, allowing light into the camera. In bulb mode, it will hold open the shutter for as long as you continue pressing down the shutter button.

For these shots, I used a $16 wireless remote trigger so that I would have my hands free to use a laser pointer. A wireless remote is also useful because it prevents you from shaking the camera while holding down the shutter button.

Now while holding down the shutter button, turn on a laser and then move it across your subject. Experiment with the speed of movement, the angle that you project the laser onto the subject, and the angle of movement (up and down, left and right, circular, etc.). You might also want to try concentrating the laser on a certain part of your subject to highlight it. I tried to highlight Christie’s eyes by spending twice as much time on that part of her, while barely moving the laser over the outer parts of her body. By the way, please make sure that you ask your model to close her eyes at all times when you are operating the laser. Shining a bright laser into someone’s eye is never a good idea.

If you project the laser from behind the camera you will notice that there will be laser lines spilling behind the subject. This might be a look that you like, but I ended up tossing those photos. If you do choose to try that route, make sure that you separate your model from the background by a large distance and use a larger aperture (f/6) so that the depth of field will blur the background lasers slightly to make your subject pop. For most of my published photos, I am projecting a laser at a 45 degree angle from the camera. This shoots the extra light off to the side and mostly out of the frame. In some of the images you can see some of that laser spill light.

I was using a very cheap red laser pointer that was sold as a cat toy at Publix. The beam of light was not as tight as you might find in a more professional laser pointer. A little bit of light would surround the laser dot, which probably helped to define the model in this scenario. I suspect that if you used a better quality laser the images might turn out even more surreal.

Warning: Lasers can permanently damage your camera’s image sensor when used incorrectly. Please make sure that you do not directly shine a laser into your lens. You should also use caution and make sure that models are not wearing any reflective items like jewelery, which could potentially reflect the laser light back into your camera.