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Create a ghost town with these simple techniques in camera and Photoshop

Posted on October 27, 2024 by Josh L

Create a ghost town with these simple techniques in camera and Photoshop

Watch the video: Ghost town

As the nights draw in and the days get shorter, your daylight shooting window will of course shrink, but that doesn’t mean you can’t work with your camera after the sun goes down. The trick is to add your own lighting.

Light painting is a fun and popular technique where you add your own lighting to a dimly lit scene, bringing it to life. Everything from a simple handheld flashlight to a flash or LED panel works. In this project we used a combination of natural light, red gel flash and wire to create an ethereal blue ‘fog’.

So when you have to play longer evenings in the winter, the only thing stopping you from going out with your camera is your imagination. So get creative after dark! Follow this project for inspiration and to see how to get started.

1. Install on a tripod

Halloween low light painting long exposure photography

A tripod is essential for painting with light photography, as it allows you to lock the composition and set a long shutter speed so that you have time to move around the scene (Image credit: Future)

For this technique, you are going to take many long exposure images and then blend them together in software to get the final result. This means that mounting on a sturdy tripod is vital to ensure that all the different combined images line up perfectly in post. Here I used my trusty Manfrotto 055.

2. Nail the focus

Halloween low light painting long exposure photography

Getting a sharp focus at night can be difficult, so illuminate the foreground with a bright light so your camera can auto-focus before switching to manual focus to lock it down (Image credit: Future)

The easiest way to focus in the dark is for you or a friend to shine a bright torch on the area you want to focus on so your camera can automatically focus on it. We focused on this tombstone to make it the focus, then switched the focus to MF to lock it in.

3. Camera settings

Halloween low light painting long exposure photography

Manual mode will give you the most control and consistent exposure when shooting at night (Image credit: Future)

Switch to manual mode (M) on your Canon EOS camera and open the aperture as wide as possible – this was f/4 on our Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS lens. Then we set the shutter speed to 15 seconds and raised the ISO to 1600.

4. Take a test shot

Halloween low light painting long exposure photography

The shutter speed here was too slow, causing the stars to become trails rather than points of light (Image credit: Future)

Take a test shot and check on the rear LCD screen to make sure the sky is well detailed. We used a shutter speed of 15 seconds, which was slow enough to not turn the stars into trails (above), but long enough for me to walk around the scene while I painted it with light.

5. Use a flash with colored gel

Halloween low light painting long exposure photography

Flash gels are a cheap and easy way to change the color of light (Image credit: Future)

To bring the church to life, I used an off-camera flash and pointed it at the architecture, then pressed the test button on the flash to fire. I also applied red gel to add some color. After that, check your images and see if you need to increase or decrease the flash power.

6. Create an electric fog with the blue L-wire

Halloween low light painting long exposure photography

Electroluminescent (EL) wire, also called string wire, comes in different colors and can be moved across the floor of your stage to create a ghostly fog (Image credit: Future)

An EL wire, also called a string wire, is a long fiber optic light connected to a battery pack. Stacking the wire together and moving it across the stage close to the ground creates an eerie fog. I chose blue to contrast with the red flash.

7. Make three main exposures

Halloween low light painting long exposure photography

Shooting your light painting with individual exposures will give you much more control when you combine them together in Photoshop (Image credit: Future)

01 Basic exposure
Once you’ve set up your tripod and adjusted your focus, it’s a good idea to take a basic shot without any light painting. This is useful because you can blend light painting layers in your main photo Photoshop and change their opacity to make them more or less bright.

02 Paint the town red
To keep the church from looking too dark in the image, I attached a red filter to the flash and flashed the scene a few times to brighten it up. Instead, you can paint your scene with a hand-held flashlight – stick a translucent candy wrapper on the bulb to change its color.

03 Add an eerie blue mist
To create the blue fog effect, it took longer than the 15 second shutter speed to paint the entire foreground with EL wire. I set our Canon to continuous burst mode, misted a few shots, and then combined them in Photoshop.

8. Combine everything together in Photoshop

Light painting

(Image credit: Future)

To complete the classic Halloween haunted house vibe, we’ve added a full moon and some bats, and you can download our starter images to your computer.

Open the original Moon.png image and press Ctrl/Cmd+A to select it and Ctrl/Cmd+C to copy. Then, on the main image, press Ctrl/Cmd+V to paste it. Press Ctrl/Cmd+T to put it in free transform mode to change its position and size.

Halloween low light painting long exposure photography

Adding a full moon with some bats flying overhead makes for a great spooky Halloween finish (Image credit: Future)

Create a new layer and paint with a soft white Brush tool at low opacity over the moon to give it a diffused glow. Now open the original Bats.png image and, as before, select them with Ctrl/Cmd+A, copy with Ctrl/Cmd+C, then press Ctrl/Cmd+V to paste them into the haunted house image.

Again use free transform by pressing Ctrl/Cmd+T to change the size and position of the bats. You may need to repeat this step a few times to increase the effect until you have enough bats in your sky to your liking.

If you enjoyed this Halloween project, be sure to check it out 10 Halloween ideas for an incredible photo shoot along with how to create creepy shadow portrait.

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