I've Been LED To This

Midnight approaches and I've not got anything blipworthy, so it's time to dig in to the list of "things to blip when you've got nothing else to photograph". Item 1 on the list is to "draw by light".

A quick search through our various keyrings reveals LED key torches of 2 colours. White, and blue. I'll go with the blue then.

What to draw? Looks around for inspiration. Spies a fat cat. It's years since I drew or painted anything but I think even I can manage this challenge :-).

It took a bit of trial and error to match my initially aimless waving around with the field of view of the lens, to allow enough time, and to get the wavy lines to be somewhat consistently drawn. This is my favourite of the results.

Since someone asked :-), here's how it was done:

Camera on tripod, set to very small aperture and 10-30 seconds exposure (enough to draw what you want to draw). Use a room where you can close all the doors and curtains and there won't be much light leaking in. Decide where you're going to do the drawing, aim camera at middle and zoom to cover the area. I put a chair just below the lens view so I knew where the bottom of the picture would be, as a reference point. Use the camera timer function to give yourself time to switch off the room lights and get in position. Switch on the LED, wait for the shutter to open then wave in a hopefully coordinated manner. Switch LED off to move between points, and try and finish just before the shutter closes :-). Repeat above till you get something respectable :-)

Oh, and last step, if the black isn't really black you can fix that in PS or whatever afterwards. Mine was OK but I did tweak the RGB curve to lose some light bleed/flare.