Lighting up a Room with Just a Flashlight

[ilghila]

I tried to take a picture of a completely dark room, lighting it up with just a pocket flashlight. The technique basically consists of taking several pictures and then adding them up.
I describe the method thoroughly here.
I show an example of application here .
Any comment or suggestion to improve the technique is welcome. Thank you.

[Mike]

This can be a fun project.

We used to do this (in film days) a lot and would of course try to do the whole photo at one time. The technique was called painting with light. We very often were called to photograph small pieces of machinery and the requestor did not want any shadows, so we did it this way.

I once took a photo of an aircraft carrier (900 and something feet long) while it was moored to a pier using this technique, but I used large flash bulbs instead of your flashlight. Sure wish that I had had PS in those days, it would have been a lot easier!

[Frank Lopes]

Years ago I used to do spelunking.

One of the tricks that we used to photograph the caves was using what you described with the flashlight: except that we used magnesium bulb flash guns instead. Typically 2.

The idea was exactly the same and since we could move the guns from place to place, behind stalactites and stalagmites, the effect was very dramatic.

We would have the camera on a very sturdy tripod wide open and pointed in the general vicinity of what we wanted to capture. A flash gun would be triggered and the lens closed. The flash gun would be moved to another spot, the lens would be open and the flash triggered.

And so on, and so on, and so on.....


[Edit]

I'm not responsible for any of these photos, but what we accomplished was similar to these images:

http://www.darklightimagery.net/caveimages.html

Originally Posted by ilghila

I tried to take a picture of a completely dark room, lighting it up with just a pocket flashlight. The technique basically consists of taking several pictures and then adding them up.
I describe the method thoroughly here.
I show an example of application here .
Any comment or suggestion to improve the technique is welcome. Thank you.