How to Make Totally Awesome Light-Writing Pics

I've had a couple of people ask me how I made this:

So, here are the simple instructions.

If you have a digital SLR, turn the dial to M for manual shooting mode. Change the aperture to Bulb. This is done by turning the wheel past the longest exposure time available, which is 30 seconds for me.

Turn your ISO to 100. Sparklers are really bright and you want your light sensitivity to be low so you don't wash out your pic.

Looking through the viewfinder, set up chairs or other easily-visible markers on the far edges of the frame so the model knows where to begin and where to stop before exiting the frame.This also helps to give the model a sense of how the size of the letters will relate to the actual picture size.

Have the model hold up something like a cell phone to illuminate themselves so you can set the focus.

Have the model light the sparkler then pose in the position they want to be captured in. Make sure the sparkler is away from their face for two reasons: One, so they don't catch their hair on fire, and two, so they don't have their face obscured by the glowing sparkler. For writing something, I found that holding my sparkler like I naturally hold a pen for writing worked best.

When they say "go," press the shutter button down to fire your flash and capture the model's pose then continue to hold the button down as they write a word or draw a picture. The slower you go, the more likely you'll get ghosting, like in my picture where you can see "ghosts" of me behind the word "life." You can remove that later in photoshop, although sometimes the ghosting looks really cool.

Specs for this pic: ISO 100, Aperture f/5.6, Exposure time 19 secs, focal length 23 mm
Camera: Canon Rebel XTi

Try this yourself and let me know how it turns out!

Lynette
@bestieverdid