A Day In The Life

Shoot 3-Light Painting

The other week I ordered four different coloured LED lights from the internet, red, clear, green and blue. Upon arriving over the weekend, I wanted to do a bit of experimenting with them, to see which colours worked best and what directions and movements created the best drawings.

To set up my shoot I used a piece of string, which I taped to the kitchen ceiling, I then taped my LED light to the end of the string, which was at shoulder height. I set my tripod up, fairly low to the ground. My camera was facing upwards looking up at the lights. I had my shutter speed on thirty seconds, aperture on F/16 and my ISO was on 100. I turned the lights off, after making sure everything was in place and my settings were all correct. I swung the piece of string in a circular direction before pressing the shutter. The circle gradually became smaller, which you can see in the image above. This photo shoot was all to do with experimentation.

I liked using the green, however in a few of my images I thought it looked rather overpowering. To create this image I spun the light in a circular motion and then about 15 seconds after pressing the shutter, I changed the direction of the light, so that it was going in an anti-clockwise direction.

Blue was the last colour I chose to work with and I think it was my favourite out of the four. I like the different tones of blue within the image, it really catches my eye. To create this shape, instead of spinning the string in a circular motion, I spun It in more of an oval shape, which I allowed to gradually become smaller.

When I began shooting, my hand movements when spinning the string were not that steady, which was causing my images to come out like in the shot above, not a fixed shape, causing it to look rather untidy. Therefore I had to try and work on how I was going to create the motion and direction of the light.

After working on my hand movements and experimenting with creating different shapes and patterns, this was the outcome. I was really pleased with how this image came out, creating such an eye catching shape. I like the way in the centre of the circle, it is a lot darker than the outside. This is because the LED was spinning slower in the centre than it was the outside. If I was to redo this shot, I would make sure the whole spirograph was in the frame, because I was shooting in the dark, I found it hard to work out what was going to be in the frame.

After experimenting with each other LED light, I wanted to see what would happen if I combined two different colours together. The two colours which I thought worked best when shooting individual colours was blue and red. Therefore I attached them both to the same piece of string. It makes my images more interesting and I like the different colours that have been created, such as the different tones of pinks and purples.

I love this image, the way it does not have any fixed shape, it's really random but I think it works really well.