Pandora's cookie jar...

The weather is still not so great here and I've still got an itch to shoot something so I decided to follow through with what I said in my past blog post where I tried out a new tool for light painting called 'EL Wire' which is electroluminescent wire.

It's neat stuff that is exactly what it sounds like. Wire that is luminescent when electricity is run through. Pretty simple really.
As I said before it has a nice sort of misty feel to it and I've been wanting to do some smokey type effects with it but my attempts at using it on my night time sites have been hit and miss so I wanted tome practice to see what I could get in a controlled setting.

The top image was an early shot using just 1 blue El Wire. The next few shots are experiments trying to mix two different colours. (green and blue)

The next shot involved some slightly quicker, wavier movements.

The effect looks a bit like that of a greeny/blue fire exploding out of the jar, not very well composed though.

Returning toa  single colour for a while...

As you can see you can get quite a few different effects depending on how you move the wire.
I found by this point however that the wires that i bought(cheaply) were not of the greatest quality, i'd had lots of problems previously but the connections are so loose they're constantly just switching off and sometimes requiring lots of adjustments to switch back on again.

After a short break I broke into multiple colours again.

... And finally a bit of solo-green wire.

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.