I was participating in a photo community at the time and they were discussing light painting. I decided to give it a try and this photo is the result of my second session with flowers.
If you're not familiar with light painting, you basically drag the shutter and use a light source to illuminate your subject. You will obviously need a tripod and a camera capable of long exposures. You don't need to be concerned about camera shake or vibration for the mirror retracting as the only thing that will show up is what you "paint". There's really no ambient light that would be picked up by the sensor or film.
I learned with a few early frames that simply waving the flashlight around produced a flat two dimensional image. There was light, but not really any depth. It lacked layers.
To produce the image above I shined the light in three distinct ways. The first was to illuminate the flowers themselves. I did that by shining the light almost directly down on them, pausing for a second on each one, and then moving on to the next. The next was focused on illuminating the stems and vase. This was done by shining the flashlight from directly behind the flower stem and vase to give it a glowing quality. And lastly I created the light swirls above the flowers by simply moving the flashlight in swirls pointed directly at the camera.
The exposure is 20 seconds at f10 at ISO 200. In hindsight I probably should have gone down to ISO 100, but I think the result is just fine. The photo was captured with a digital SLR.
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