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.