If you think about it, all photography is painting with light. Even the word photography in Latin literally means painting with light. Every time you make an exposure the light is writing or painting on the digital sensor to record the photograph.

It was almost totally dark except for a sliver of orange light along horizon when I took this photo. This is a single 15 second exposure during which time I used a flashlight to paint light onto the tree and the reflection in the water. It was shot with a 16 by 35mm Canon lens set to 16mm. The ISO was 200 in my Canon 5D Mark II camera.

In this case painting with light means using a flashlight to actually paint light on to the subject during the exposure. This is how I created the photograph, Cyprus Sunset. Without using a flashlight to paint the cypress tree, there would have been no contrast between the dark tree and the dark night sky. Using the flashlight to brighten the tree while the shutter was open created the contrast I needed in this photograph.

These photos of Italy were taken on 3 separate trips with our family. At first I didn’t even think I would enjoy Italy. I thought there was enough to see in the US, so I didn’t need to cross the ocean to see more, boy was I wrong. Italy is a beautiful country with very nice and wonderful people and the food is great.

I was just getting into digital photography when I captured these images. Unfortunately I photographed them all in JPEG format instead of raw format. And to make matters worse I didn’t even save the original JPEG images, I copied over them which means I lost a lot of data. Some of these photos can only be printed in small sizes.

I have learned a lot since then and this was an important lesson.

Never ever copy over the original photos out of the camera. Always save the to original photos. As new software emerges and your skills and knowledge improve you may want to go back to the original images, that have all the data that was captured, in order to redevelop your photos.