The glow of shadows in the black light.

After the recent experimentation with UV paints and a black light I felt I needed to have another stab at it with a little bit more pre-planning.

This time I used a marker on the ground to show me roughly where I should stand to be in focus, I could still lean back and forward with no restriction to throw it in and out of focus with the shallow depth of field I was using. (Aperture 1.8)
I'm afraid I'm the only test subject I've got for this experimentation and I'm no model, so, sorry. There is a lot of my face incoming...

The first set I just painted a simple skull on my face, mostly to get the adjustments right.

Then I threw on an Indian headdress I have kicking around the house.

YELLOW
Next up I smeared the white from the skull design evenly over the rest of my famous and thought I'd give yellow a stab and painted a band across my eyes.

A lot of the shots had the yellow over expose a little too easily. I found that shots with the black light indirectly illuminating the paint looked better. In most of the shots you can actually see me holding the black light behind my head.

GREEN
Next up was an experiment in green.

I also played around with some El Wire as I had it handy.

I wasn't that keen on the design I came up with for the green paint to be honest so I decided to try smearing it on camera.
To pull it off I had to smear the paint as you'd expect but hold still for the shots themselves.
I'd literally: Smudge. Freeze. Shoot. Repeat

I kinda feel that this was the best shot of the green set.

Red and Blue(AKA The Angry Smurf)
Now the last set was red and blue, slightly thickly/messily, applied diagonal stripes.

The blue is a difficult colour to expose well for as the white balance that gets a good look for the blue tends to have a negative effect ont he red and vice versa.
You might notice the colours vary slightly in the following shots as a result.

I have to admit, my choice of hat here... well if it were white i'd look like a smurf fresh from the set of Braveheart.

Once again, I decided to shoot the smearing of the paint.

I was quite happy with the way the paints mixed and some of the previous greens and yellows were starting to show through as I did so.

For the next shot I tried scratch the paint with my fingernails, not particularly hard, I wasn't expecting it to have any effect but it was more dramatic than expected.

This was literally the last shot, by this point I'd been smearing the paint again which had smoothed over the scratched areas.

Finally this is what the paint looked like in normal light after I'd finished smearing it and before I washed it off. A lot of it is surprisingly unoticable under normal light.

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.

The Colour Red!!!

So Gizmodo.co.uk like to run the occasional Shooting Challenge.
Generally speaking I miss it or fail to get a shot done in time. This time is not much different except I was determined to get an entry in so... despite not having anything on the final day of entries i decided to give it a stab.

Now today I was in the office so I had the following amounts of time available.
13:00-14:00 lunch hour
17:00-18:00 Time between when I get home and the time submissions must be entered by.

So... 2 hours.

Here's the brief of what needed to be achieved:

For this week’s Shooting Challenge, I want you to make a photograph or series of photographs that focuses on the colour red. I’m looking for creative photographs that instantly draw the viewers to that colour. I don’t want to see any ‘selective colour’ photography as this usually requires some post­processing work and only minimal global post­processing is permitted.

I had a few basic ideas. I wasn't going to have too much time to experiment THAT much but I'd been thinking of grabbing some large black tiles to use as photographic backgrounds for a long while and this seemed like a good excuse.
I grabbed myself two black tiles, one very reflective one and one non-reflective one and a shiney red tile.
I looked for other materials whilst I was there but I had to head back to work.

So that was it. I got home at 17:00, dug out my cheapo studio lighting kit and shot away.
Here are those results.

 The above shot shows one of the problems I had along the way. Dust, lint and just... bits of stuff showed up very easily on the tiles. I spent a fair while wiping them down as even after I got them clear some dust would settle a bit later on.

 My son had left out his felt tip pens, in fact, namely just his red one which I took to be a sign.

After I'd finished with the tiles I had about ten minutes left before I had to get the photos off the camera and sent to Gizmodo.
Before I did  that though I really wanted to try an experiment using red food colouring dropped into water in a clear container.

I didn't submit any of these because they required far too much post-processing to get to how they are but they were an interesting 10-15 minute experiment.

The food colouring will just sink to the bottom of the water on it's own, you need to mix it with something thicker. On this occasion I used milk.

Finally just for fun I played with the Hue/Saturation and made it not red any more.

So there you go. With less than an hours worth of prep and a bit of determination this is the sort of thing you can spin out of your camera folks.