Hey everybody, it's Craig back to here and in this video I'm going to share five tips with you to improve your long exposure portraits using light painting. All right, tip number one is to use a sturdy tripod because you're going to be shooting anywhere between six seconds and up. So the images you see in this video were shot between six seconds and eight seconds. So what you need to do is mount your camera on a tripod, set your camera to about six or eight seconds and take a test shot in a darkened room. If you don't see a lot of ambient light bleed in the image, then you're good to go and you move on to step two. Now tip two is to expose for your subject using flash. Now you can use a speed light for this, studio strobe, any type of modifier you want, shoot it like you would a normal portrait. So what we did was we set it for shutter speed 200 ISO 100. We set the lights up the way we want it. We took a test shot. Once I got the lighting right, then I switched my camera to six seconds. Now the third step is to use a light painting tool. Dosh was using the small flashlight like this. Now the thing is it can be a little boring if it's just white light. So that brings me to my fourth tip. And that is to modify this using a colored gel. Now you can get gel kits from any photography store for speed lights and then you could use them with this. So here's an example of how you would use it with a speed light. So you just take these different colored gels and you tape them to this flashlight so there's no light bleed. And that way you can paint with color which makes it more interesting. Which brings me to tip number five. You can also get different light painting wands. Now I found this one at light painting brushes.com. I'm not affiliated with them in any way but they have a wide selection of different plexiglass wands. And so what you can do is you can put the color gel on the flashlight and then insert it, tape it up. And then you can get different interesting patterns like you see in this video. And there's a wide variety of different light wands that you can use. Now bonus tip two is to have an assistant help you out with this. So that you don't have to press the shutter and then run over. I mean sure you can remotely trigger it. But it's easier if you have an assistant and then have them dress all in black. So what you want to do is to take that shot and then have your subject freeze in place and then start the light painting. Now another bonus tip two is it's good if you can shoot tether to a computer either to capture one or light room because after you take the shot then whoever you're with the model yourself if you have an assistant you can review the images on the computer and then you can make some creative adjustments to your light painting. Anyway I hope you found these tips helpful. Give me a thumbs up if you found this video helpful. Also if you're not already a subscriber, hit that subscribe button and hit that bell notification for email updates. Now the content from this video is from a course that I just created. You can find out more about that light painting course in the description box just below this video. So check that out too as well. Anyway thanks again for watching and I'll see you in the next video.