2 posts tagged “light painting”

Show us some cool lights.  
Submitted by meg.

A few months ago I was in Games of Berkeley, and I found some really cool light balls.  They were basically a bunch of tiny little rubber balls inside a big rubber skin, and they had a light source inside them.  If you squeezed the ball, the light went through a slow oscillation of colors, followed by a fast blink cycle.

I bought them for a friend, and that night we took them out to a park in his neighborhood.  Two cameras, two tripods, one wireless remote shutter release, and we were in business.  One of us would man the cameras, while the other would stand in front of them, squeeze the balls to light them up, and then wave their arms wildly about until the shutter closed.

We tried all sorts of variations on the theme, including walking forward and backward, juggling, and spelling out various things.  Although it was our initial inspiration, juggling turned out to be insanely hard and we quickly abanadoned it in favor of other things.  I had a lot of fun doing this, and I'm hoping to repeat the project sometime with glow poi and a glow staff-- I have the lights, but I haven't had the time to go out and shoot with them.

Last weekend I bought a couple of OddBallz light-up DNA balls to use in photographic experiments.  We were originally going to juggle with them, but that proved to be a bit difficult, so we wound up just waving them around in interesting patterns.

The procedure was pretty simple:  we put both cameras on tripods, and set them for remote shutter release.  Then we found one spot on the ground and set it as the focal point, then aimed, zoomed, and focused both cameras on that point.  The cameras were set for varying exposure times, mostly in the range of five to ten seconds.

From there, one of us would man the cameras while the other took the balls to the focus point, started them glowing, and then waved them around in patterns we thought might be interesting.  At some point, Mark discovered that you could get really interesting effects if you moved toward the camera (and therefore got the light out-of-focus), and I figured out it was pretty easy to draw letters and shapes.

I shot the whole batch in raw mode, which made post-processing of the images pretty easy.  The area wasn't quite as dark as I would have liked, so most of the shots had a faint image of the background showing through the lights.  The raw processing to get rid of this was quite simple:  increase the shadows until the background faded away, and then increase the exposure (and the brightness if necessary) until the lights looked good.  Save and repeat for all of the images that are worth showing.

We both had a lot of fun with this shoot, and we're looking forward to doing it again.  Our next project will be shooting glow poi, I think.