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!!