light painting by DMC jr

last saturday, during the morning CCA session, we taught the girls of DMC jr to do the light painting. as usual, some were enthusiastic, excited while some not really interested. doesn't matter anyway. i personally like the attitudes of the third group, where these girls were very excited to do this thing. "wow, this is something new sir, can we really do it?" although they didn't bring their compact camera (forgotten i suggest). well, some of the pix above were the product of the enthusiastic 3rd group. and to make it really interesting, we challenged them to create something much better for the next CCA session.

btw, all this time we thought this light painting is only possible with the dslr (oh this is so embarassing), however it is NOT! you can do it also using the compact digital camera. How to do it?

well, light painting is only possible if the camera have the ability to delay the shutter speed by few seconds. of course only the dslr can do that by setting the shutter time to few seconds or even better, just use the bulb. so how is it possible in the compact digital camera since there is no such thing as manual exposure as well as shutter timing setting? very easy. go find the mode in your camera that says "FIREWORKS". yes, that will do the trick. because in order to capture the fireworks, the compact camera will do their own auto setting so that you can capture all those lightings from the fireworks.

however the only drawbacks from this mode is, the shutter timing will vary depending on the camera models. we did some tests with the students' compact camera, and we found out that some camera only let the shutter to open for 2 seconds (if im not mistaken, that's sony cybershot), others let 5 seconds and the longest is 10 seconds exposure. try it!