Paint with light, learn how to make very bright pictures, so-called overexposure, and learn how to make dark pictures, so called underexposure. To do this purposefully can be fun and also let you use photography in a creative way to express something in your heart and on your mind.
What message does a light picture have for you? It may say something that is clear in your mind, or it may show something that is hard to achieve, or just make a clear and crisp picture of something that carries importance for you, for example being with kids and family, as it may be for many. A darker picture may portray deep feelings, hurt emotions and show mystery. Here you get to be creative. When you have decided what to aim for, it’s time to figure out the camera settings you want to use.
On the camera you may have an exposure setting that says something like -1, or -1 and respectively +1 or +2, use that if you are photographing automatic and if you are using manual camera let in less or more light with ISO, shutter speed or aperture.
A more literal way to paint with light is to use a flashlight in a dark room, and see how you can capture the moving light before the shutter is done with time, you may want to set this on one minute or several minutes, experiment!
Just to broaden your perspective of what is possible in the photography world, when you get more advanced, is that you can make HDR pictures which get sharp and full of contrast, this by combining three pictures of the same thing, one underexposed picture, one normal, and one overexposed. These files can then be combined in, for example, Photoshop.
Hope this could be of some inspiration, I will have some photography lessons now and then as it can be part of a healing process too.
