Today I had my first chance to try an experiment I had been wanting to do for some time — “painting” with light on a photographic image.  I used a red laser pointer, which I aimed at a dark blue poster board background inside a room that was very dimly lighted.  I could see enough to walk around, but all bright lights were turned off.

I had the Fujifilm FinePix X100 camera on a solid tripod, set to Manual exposure mode, with the aperture set to f/5.6 and the shutter speed set to the B setting, for Bulb.  ISO was set to 200.  The blue background was about 4 feet (1.2 meter) away from the lens.

I attached a standard cable release to the shutter release button and held the shutter open for 15 seconds.  During that time, I attempted to trace the word “FUJI” on the background.  Of course, all I could see was the bright red dot from the laser, so I had to do my best to keep tracing the letters in the right shapes.  I added a couple of lines as flourishes at the end, below the letters.  Here is what I chose as the best result from about 10 attempts:

I didn’t post-process this image at all in Photoshop; this is exactly as it looked coming out of the camera. I plan to do some more experiments and will post the results here if anything turns out to be interesting.