Blacklight and UV Paint experimentation!

The weather recently has been... Pretty poor.

No opportunities for any night time excursions so a good opportunity for some experimentation.

Ever since I tried infrared photography way back when, a thought has been in the back of my head as to what you could do with Ultra violet. Now I realise it's not the same thing but the main thought I had was of a blacklight I used to own as a kid and what sort of shots and effects I could get using it.

As a result, several months ago, I grabbed some UV paints, not really knowing what I was going to do with it and basically not getting round to do anything with them, until now!

Now I'm not too experienced at this but the premise I went by was that I could use similar techniques as I do for astro-photography in a 'studio' (lounge) environment, lit by a blacklight and... Things painted in uv paint. not really sure what to do I went ahead and just stead some over my face and tried to shoot myself.

It is not easy to shoot yourself I should say. The blacklight I'm using is no where near as bright as a flashgun or strobe and making sure I'm within the focal range of the lens is difficult when I'm on the wrong side of the camera. As a result, a lot of the shots were out of focus but the ones that were in focus had some really nice effects.

I think this one is one of the better shots from the first face-paint 'design'. The purple light in the background is the black-light itself.

The next design involved some of the blue paint but of the shots I got in focus I tihnk this was the best of the bunch.

At this point I'd gotten my settings down to about f/1.8, shutter speed of 1 second or a little under and an ISO of 800. The aperture is so wide to allow for quicker shutter speeds and I didn't want my ISO much higher than 800 because i hate handling noise... that said, i'd've been better off with more in-focus images than non-noisy blurred ones...

You can imagine what the rest are like if this is the best...


Finally I tried slapping the paint on a lot thicker and including more colours to see how they all came out.
Bit of a smeary rainbow face paint basically.

This is what it looked like under normal light before I washed it off.

There we have it, my first dabbling in black-light photography.