Eggs on Forks.

Eggs. you can fry them, poach them, scramble them and boil them or, you could paint them with light.

My recipe:

Take one egg, place on two forks that are intertwined.

Turn off lights and ensure eggs on forks are sitting on a white board.

Set camera to timed exposure and aperture to around f10.

Set time to 30 seconds, and click shutter button (a remote trigger is recommended).

Whilst the time is elapsing, use a torch to paint the egg, and then swing it around to create a lovely background pattern.

Import into lightroom and then perform minor alterations until perfect.

Export to WordPress and enjoy…

Have a great week

Light Fight

So, before I went away, I had a few ideas of experimental photographs that I wanted to try in the darkness… and this was one… kind off On the first night, we decided to try and make an orb. A lot of different attempts finally resulted in the very first photo. Well done to Steven for perfecting it. The other photos were some outdoor swinging of fairy light fun that he, Ammar and I had. Sadly after we got back I remembered that we forgot to paint the outdoor scene with a torch. If I’d done that our orb would have been ‘on’ something, rather than just in the black!

If you’re interested in the orbs, check out Evan’s excellent Photo Extremist blog.

Have a great week

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Painting with Light

One of my favourite things about the recent trip away was the lack of street and other invasive light. This presented me with the ability to paint with light (as well as light paint) . My friend, Steve had kindly brought along a 5 million candle power torch to ‘paint’ with. For the shot below, the camera was left on a long exposure of around 10 seconds (I think), which allowed it to soak in the beautiful blue twilight sky. The grass was black and painted using the torch. For the second photo, I painted the foreground trees with the torch and left the rest as they were.

Have a great week

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Abyss

Two weeks ago my wife, kids and a couple of friends rented a lovely converted barn in Kent. This made a nice base from which to visit the local area where I finally got to visit Dungeness and, maybe more importantly provided me with no light pollution at night, which allowed me to get involved in some interesting photography. I get pretty bored taking photographs of scenery etc… what’s always been my favourite genre for photography is experimentation, playing with speed, playing with lights, creating an interesting setup for a photograph and it’s great to finally get back into doing these things.

Before I went away I bought a few fairy lights and the photo below was done using them. I got a lazy susan, arranged the lights roughly on the thing, focused, spun and clicked a long exposure (of around 5 seconds).

Have a great week…

Blue Swirl

Another light painting photograph… I think it’s time to try doing some more of these

Have a great weekend.

How to Create Light Painting Photos (My Setup)

Whilst there are many different types of light painting, most of them far superior to the simple stuff I’m doing, the two that I currently am able to do are, 1) Set up the camera as per a normal shot, then stand in front of it and paint. 2) Set up the camera vertically, and spin a suspended light round and let the camera capture what it sees. This blog posting is how to setup for the second type.

Once again, for a lot of the technical details of this setup, I urge you to visit Mike Pouliot’s Photography Blog and to view the comments for this posting. I think all of the camera specific settings are detailed in the comment that Mike left me there. For me, AI Servo mode is the most important one in getting a clear light painting shot.

For my set up, I bought a small maglite torch from Argos (Very nice because it’s boxed and fits nicely into my camera bag for when I have light painting moments).

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/9821572/Trail/searchtext>MAGLITE.htm

Despite being a small torch, it has more than enough light to paint with, as the photos show. In fact, less is probably best because you don’t really want to flood the sensor with 10,000 candles worth of power. Additionally, if you’re going to tie something to your light fitting, make it a light light! (By the way, I take no responsibility for you damaging your house… be careful and don’t electrocute yourself!)

I then got some strong string (from my mum’s house… turned out I have none!) and tied it through the tiny holder part of the torch (think keyring attachment loop). This is important as it keeps the torch hanging nicely, if you tie it around the torch, it will tilt to one side unless you balance it. I tied the other end of the string to my light fitting (after removing the bulb, lampshade etc…, i.e. anything that may stop the spinning motion). You’ll notice in the shot below that I have a halogen light fitting. I used this set of lights as well as a normal single bulb one. With the halogen fitting, I had to remove the bulb as the string kept hitting the bulb and skipping thus ruining my smooth pattern.

I set the camera on a tripod, as low as it would go, then had it looking up directly vertically, setting it to focus on the light. Once that was done, I set the mirror lockup (to ensure no movement when I wanted to take a photo), connected the remote trigger and set my camera to a 2 second delay. I then rechecked the focus, clicked the remote trigger and quickly spun the torch. Give it a good swing, or a light swing… experiment. I tried different timings for the exposure up to 30 seconds max. Play with it.

Also, experiment with the focal length… you may find that zooming out completely allows you to capture all the motion, however, being zoomed in can work very nicely as well as it shows just part of the geometric centre (as in the third photo in my previous post). Shame that one came out blurred!

AND here are the photos that I took of my setup. These were taken pretty late at night with my iPhone (only 3GS…. awwww), but I hope they’re clear enough for you. One final thing, try to keep all the lights off, the curtains closed etc… Any little light will factor in otherwise and may start cause the light fittings to become visible.

More Light Painting

Here are some of the other photos from my light painting geometry session that didn’t turn out too badly.

Light Painting – Geometric

Well, Photoless Friday was a dumb idea so, that’s done. I recently did some more light painting. For this, I got a small maglite torch, tied it to a string and attached it to my lights. I then focussed the camera on it (set it to AI Servo mode), and hit the trigger with a 2 second delay. And then, I swung the light and let it play out over. This works quite nicely, but, I can’t get rid of tail. The tail occurs when the shutter shuts. I guess I could leave the shutter open even longer but, I’m sure that would create some other issues. Photoshopping it didn’t do a good job, so, it is as it is.  I’m not going to tell you anything else about my settings, instead, I’m going to point you to Mike Pouliot’s Photography Blog, and, more specifically, this posting. Take a look at the comments where Mike gave me every detail required to perfect the technique. Thanks, Mike! I got some other shots from this session which I’ll post next week.

Well after about six weeks of chicken pox between me and the two boys, we’re all ready to finally go out to somewhere other than the supermarket. I hope the weather’s nice because, I want to be enjoying the sun! Have a great weekend.   )

Retro Arcadia

Over the last two months I’ve had a complete mental block in terms of what to take photos of. I’ve found myself completely dried up for ideas. Over the last week, however, blogging and visiting a lot of great photography blogs has suddenly brought it all back thanks to the great inspiration that I find from other people. Some excellent photos out there, and I’m grateful to those that share theirs, to those that take the time to comment, or answer comments, and especially to those that share the knowledge of how they created their art.

This photo, ‘retro Arcadia’ (in has an 80s kind of look to it) was created with a children’s spinning light fan that I moved round like a rollercoaster. The fan is similar to this. I don’t remember any of the settings but I do remember that this was 1 good photo in a 100. Yes, it’s a little blurred, but, I like it.