We’re doing a photo challenge with our comrades in arms over at JPG Magazine to celebrate good times, good friends, and the greatest goshdurn photo book ever written.

The challenge is all about light painting, a really fun technique for low-light, long-exposure photography. We’ve got a tutorial that gives you all the tips and tricks in our amazing book(!) written by our pal Matt Nuzzaco, but for those of you who don’t have it yet, here’s a condensed version to get you started.

What you’ll need:

• Darkness
• A camera with long-exposure capability (on some point and shoots, “Night Mode” will work.
• A Tripod
• Light! (flashlights, glow sticks, sparklers, laser pointers, LEDs, anything that makes light)

How to do it:

First things first, this works best at night, because you want as much of the background noise and light to be gone, so only the light you’re drawing with is visible.

Camera Settings
Set up your camera on a tripod, zoom out as much as possible, set your ISO as low as possible (50 or 100) and clamp down your aperture as tight as you can (f22), all of this will limit the amount of light that interferes with your painting. You’ll also want to focus in on an object near where you’ll be standing, then set your camera to manual focus.

Test shot
Now set your camera to do a 5 second exposure, click the shutter, than run about 5 feet in front of your camera and draw your name in the air with a flashlight while facing your lens. Check the exposure to see how it came out, and adjust your shutter time accordingly. (Note: Point and shoots that don’t let you pick a shutter speed may have a “Night Mode” that works for this.)

Now paint!
Once you’ve got the exposure down, it’s time to have fun! Experiment with different lights, draw shapes, or letters, use a flashlight to illuminate objects or people in the camera’s field of view, and get a friend to help you make bigger things. Have a blast!

Examples:

Examples from Matt Nuzzaco, author of the Light Painting tutorial in The Photojojo Book!