Thursday, August 13, 2009

Shooting light beams

A lot of people create light beams in Photoshop for their action figure shots but then there are some others who want the real deal. I've been following the work of various photographers in the Gunpla and Action Figure groups to learn how they achieve this effect and now I've done it myself !

You need
1. Focused LED light
2. Candle light or tea light

For this to work, there should be only two sources of light during the shoot or you wont get a good effect. Position your action figure the way you want it and setup the tripod so that its in your range of view. Now Set the Shutter speed to anywhere from 10 to 15 seconds while in shutter priority mode.

Set the camera to go off on timer and then bring the LED to the starting position of the beam and when the shutter opens gently draw along the imaginary light path. When you complete that then you need to fill in the light using your candle or tea light. Make a few passes to highlight the model or create shadows. Thats it ! All this in 10-15 seconds.

Heres what it should look like finally.

SD firing

Gundam Wing Chest Beam




4 comments:

Elegant Chic said...

AWESOME!!!

eleventh.st said...

Thanks for the tips! Will def try it out!

Bu Yousef said...

Cool :)

Mathai said...

Thank you all ! :)

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