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!!

Light artists

I have been searching for some artists that have an interest purely in creating light art and there is an abundance of beautiful pictures out there. I'm amazed at how pretty these pictures are. Please follow the links below, if I could come close to producing anything like this I would be really pleased. I'm hoping however by using lightsabers instead of light pens I may get some interesting results, I'm also hoping that I don't need to make any adjustments within Photoshop to improve the quality.

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

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

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

http://www.targetti.com/art/en/section_1/Light_Art_Collection

It would be really nice if in due course I could take some LEDs and imbed them in one of those really bouncy balls and use that to create freeform light art. I might look into this for my final project.

Concept and purpose

The purpose of this etude is generally just an exploration of artistic practice that is different from my usual work. I have never looked into this area before and the results that I have seen on my various research travels are fascinating. I'm finding the freedom of experimentation on this the module the interesting thing. I'm not sure at this stage whether I will be using this idea towards my final study although I have some ideas that may develop into a more clear direction for my final piece in due course.

How to make light art.

As I stated on the previous post the way to make light art is to change the shutter speed of a digital camera to slow, the kind of setting that you would need to use for night time photography without using a flash. The other important part of taking photos of course is the light sources that you use. The site that I found online has an interesting tutorial for making your own light pens and obviously because they experiment with light photography a lot they are providing lots of interesting information for any new light artist.

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

It is possible to use any intensive light source such as laser pens, which seem to have limited colours available for purchase or you could possibly wire up some LED's or even use torches with various plastic/cellophane filters on to change the light colour. The other interesting idea is that you don't, for obvious reasons, need to just use one light you could use multiple light sources, for instance you could make a light suit of some sort with various LED's on the sleeves or legs etc. Alternatively you could use apparatus such as a fan and attach some lights to the blades.

Here's a web site for the group called PikaPika who do animated light art

http://tochka.jp/pikapika/

The sight shows some very interesting footage from the group of artists at work. Here's some from youTube as well that demonstrates the work they have done:-



I think the easiest way for me to progress with the creating one of these pieces is to use the light sources that I have and work with them first to see what effects I can create, then in due course I can try and get some better equipment. At the moment I have some lightsabers which will at least create some large sweeping light areas rather than just the point lights that PIkaPika and other artist use. I think it may give me an interesting edge. The only problem I foresee is the cumbersome aspect of the sabers, they are a bit unwieldy and therefore the possibilities of a delicate flower or something are limited, the other point I need to make is that I can only envisage being able to use two lightsabers at once, obviously one in each hand. I'm hoping that people viewing the art will be very fascinated in the results as I am, a visual feast of colour create by light.

3D Hybrids Etude 3

For my third study I would like to look into light art/photograph. There seems to be a photography theme going on here!!
I found the idea whilst looking at resources for the second study and I found some of the art work extremely fascinating.
I am going to find a series of studies and web-sites with relevance to this project to show what can be done with light art.

To explain for those that don't know what light art is, it is a photo or series of stills. The person in the photo is usually in the dark, the photographer sets the the camera on to a really slow shutter speed, as you would do when taking photos in the dark with no flash, then the person in the photo make shapes/pictures with torches, laser lights or LED's.

My aim for this etude is to produce at least one interesting photos using light.

Below are some examples:-


Photo courtesy of http://lightdoodles.com/images/picasso.jpg

A picture by Picasso of a centaur. Picasso saw light photographs by Gjon Mili and it inspired him to produce his own. Gjon Mili took the photo and Picasso obviously chose the subject matter. The interesting thing in this piece is that it is not in the dark and it has been changed to black and white therefore changing the whole feel of the picture.

One of the most interesting light artist groups that I found on my travels was that of PikaPika, they are a Japanese group of artists and they took light drawing to the next level by making a series of still photos in such a way to appear as moving animated shapes. Here is a single shot examples of their work.


http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2282/1994138549_a6653c2657.jpg?v=0


http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2392/1994976684_9186412c4c.jpg

The other point to make about this idea of changing the shutter speed on a camera is the you can also get interesting effects without light as the main focal point, I have attached three photos from a holiday that created some interesting results, one of which is a light source picture.