2 Create a crazy light show

Turn everyday items into a riot of colour, using a locked-off camera and some easy-to-find, handheld lighting kit

All photography is concerned with capturing the light reflecting off a subject. When you work indoors, you can use multiple light sources to illuminate the scene. Lighting from the top, back, sides or front changes the character of a subject dramatically, but mixing them together to get just the right balance generally requires a complex setup with a lot of lights, stands, and light-modifying kit.

That’s not the case with this technique, though: provided you can keep the camera still, you can take multiple shots with different lighting effects, then blend them together using Photoshop layers to get the effect you want. The shot on the right was lit by one Mini MagLite torch and a bunch of string lights, and the six separate shots were then blended together to give the final, colourful result.

The camera settings for all six shots were the same: Manual exposure mode with an 8 sec shutter speed, an aperture of f/11, and ISO set to 100.