Summary

Etude 3

Light Art

Statement Of Intentions

My idea for this study was to explore light art, initially art that is created using a camera on slow exposure so that you can leave light trails and form shapes in the dark. I wanted to produce a piece using the facilities that I had around my home. I have a digital camera and a series of coloured lightsabers which I thought may produce something interesting.

Conceptualisation Of The Work

The idea behind this study was to explore light art, initially just keeping within the confines of light art to form pictures in the air using a slow shutter speed on the camera, however on exploration I think that any art using light is relevant and therefore my research has touched on these areas too. I stumbled across light art on the internet by accident and there are so many fascinating pieces that I thought it would be lovely to explore. Light is amazing and light art is just mind blowing, I found that I was extremely in ore of the art produced by the PikaPika project.
I thought that I might incorporate the light art in my final piece for 3D hybrids but make an installation piece which can be used to create some form of light art. 3D hybrids has wide scope and I think that the light art falls very well into this category and I'm looking forward to experimenting further.
I think that I should be able to make some interesting pictures even with the limited equipment that I have, and if I can produce something artistic then that will be a good achievement. To some extent I think the enjoyment of producing art is the key and not necessarily the outcome of the piece, well that's my approach anyway.

Documentation of Technical and Artistic Process

See blog entries below

Technical Analysis

See blog entries below

References

http://www.trustedreviews.com/digital-cameras/review/2006/11/23/Digital-Camera-Tutorial-Shutter-speed/p3

http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/how-to-capture-motion-blur-in-photography/

http://tochka.jp/pikapika/

http://www.targetti.com/art/en/section_3/award

http://www.instructables.com/id/Write-or-Draw-with-Light!/

http://lightdoodles.com/pages/about.htm

http://www.instructables.com/id/EWL9H74LX4EP286JFD/

http://insurance-quotes-for-you.com/Light_Graffiti.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lichtfaktor/show/

http://flickr.com/photos/unklstuart/sets/72157601507669278/


How Successful Is The Etude?

I think whilst the study was fairly basic I think I achieved some reasonably pretty light pictures, although the camera limitation was definitely a stumbling block. The exposure settings on my camera weren't manually adjustable meaning that the trails of light that I got weren't captured as well as they could have been. There is always a degree of frustration when technology lets you down. On the positive side I think the alternative camera on the iPhone gave more promising results, again I didn't achieve any shapes or anything that I set out to do but the results were interesting. The study has been enjoyable and I have learnt how to produce better pictures.

Light Experimentation 5

I have decided to try one more final thing and that is to use an alternative camera. I'm going to try and use my iPhone to capture the light sources to see if the results are any better.
Right here are the results I think they are better, the only thing that I have done to them in photoshop is to crop some of them and adjust the colours slightly to mask out the background as there was too much light in the room.











The equipment that I used for these photos was an iPhone camera, a light pen and a NSD powerball.

Light Experimentation 5

I managed to find some alternative bright light sources to try out on this project, it becomes very apparent at this stage that my camera really doesn't have enough flexibility in the exposure adjustment to make this kind of project work extremely well. If I had more flexibility these photos would be very successful, however I do still like the results. May I just add the amount of physical effort put into these is almost worth the sweat!






Also, as above, I can adjust the colours in Photoshop as an experiment. For some reason it seems that the majority of my light sources are blue.

Light Experimentation 4

Here are some more experimental photographs:-

Light experimentation 3

I tried to do some experimentation with object in front of the sabers, but none of the photos really came out that well. I used a form of bubble wrap because it's clear and I hoped it might look good but I'm disappointed with the results as the bubble wrap blurs the image too much. I might try with a different type of wrap with smaller bubbles and see how that comes out.

Light experimentation 2

As mentioned below I was going to mask off areas of the lightsabers to see whether it made the photos more interesting.
The results are below:-






I think the results are more interesting than the first set, I could go further and put object in front of the sabers and see if that makes any exciting effects.

Light experimentation

I've been experimenting with light sources and my camera and as I mentioned before the functions available on the camera I have are limited. The best I could do to change the exposure is purely to turn of the flash and make the room as dark as possible, therefore making the camera work overtime to automatically adjust the light coming into it. I've tried simply a few shots with the lightsabers to see how effective the pictures would be.
I have adjusted the results slightly in Photoshop just to make the black blacker and the colours accordingly brighter. Here are the photos I took:-











As you can see from the photos they are nice shots but they aren't really forming any shapes or anything, it would be nicer if I could control the exposure more. Seeing as at this stage I'm working with what I've got I was thinking that maybe I could mask off areas of the sabers and try and get a broken light pattern instead of one solid flash. I think this is the next port of call, let's see how successful this is!!