Light Graffiti Part 2

Randomness — By kurteng on January 23, 2009 11:27 am

As you saw 2 weeks ago, light graffiti is a very powerful yet stylish form of photography and art. Here, you can use your imagination on spatial light creations. Today, I’ll go through my step by steps on how to get started.

What do you need?

• LED lights: I got keychain ones from PhotonLight. Works great and if I need it for my keys, double whammy! Make sure you get different colors. You can actually get a bulk discount if you buy more than 4. You can also build your own, but I figured I’d use these lights camping. The price difference is going to be about the same.

• A digital camera with manual mode: this will not work unless you can manually change your shutter speed to 30 seconds and can manually adjust the aperture
• A dark room. I used my bathroom since the counter-top is fairly high (since I’m tall)
• A tripod if you don’t have a high counter-top in your bathroom like I do
• Patience… you’ll need it! It is very hard to get it right the first time. It is even harder to realize that you need to write backwards in order to get your text to come out looking normal. Luckily, I’ve had years of practice in the lab

First step: Room and camera set up (lights on)

• You’ll want to set up your room before you start any picture taking or drawing. Find a spot to put your camera/tripod and stand in front of you camera as if you would be taking a picture of yourself. Mark where you would be standing and take a picture with the lights on to make sure you are in the view frame. If you are, we can move on. If you aren’t, adjust your camera/tripod position so that you can see your entire body, leaving some room above your head. This might be a considerable distance.
• Next, you’ll want to change the settings on your camera. Remember, you’ll need manual mode.
  • Change your shutter speed to at least 30 seconds
  • Set the timer to 10 seconds which gives you enough time to go from the camera to your starting point. If your camera comes with a remote, set the timer to a shorter delay.
  • As for the aperture, you will need to fool around with this depending on how bright you want your pictures. I started with f/9 with ISO 400 but these can be changed (remember, practice makes perfect)

Second step: An Idea (lights on)

• What do you want to draw? What do you want to write? Remember, you will need to write your text backwards to make it look correct when the picture is finished!

  

  img from: http://www.webfontlist.com/pages/station.asp?ID=11666&x=Fonts

• Once you have an idea, go back to the camera and set up your borders. Where can you draw and where would you need to stop?
• After you have your [imaginary] borders set up, practice a dry run and just draw in the air. Are you still within your borders?

Third step: A practice picture (lights off)

• Go ahead and take a picture with your settings. Try and use the remote or timer as I had mentioned before. Remember, you have 30 seconds (with the settings I used) to draw what you need to.
• Once you finish your drawing, don’t turn on the lights until the camera finishes and closes the shutter.
• How did it come out?

  

Fourth step: Go nuts!

• Remember to practice and try different camera settings. You’ll get it eventually. It took me about 7 attempts to get this:

  

I’ll be finishing this series up in a couple of weeks, with perhaps a video! For now, you can follow my Light Graffiti pictures here on Flickr!

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