Blacklights, Tapes's and Powder-Smeared faces,

Just a quick update today as I have two new bits of equipment to experiment with.

These aren't great shots, i Just couldn't resist the urge to see what I could do with them.
First up was some "El Tape", much the same as the El Wire I've been using recently, except this tape is flat and broad, like a ribbon shape, it is also firmer. One problem I have with El Wire is it likes to curl up more than i'd like, this stuff however you can whip about in more intentional directions.

These are just a few experiments in my lounge, there's no attempt at keeping the camera level or doing anything specific with them, it's just an exercise to work out how the light paints itself in difference to the wire.

Next up is some more blacklight experimentation. This time instead of paints I found you could get the powdered stuff before it's mixed into a paint. You get slightly different effects using it and it's much easier to capture some details/textures using powder than it is a liquid paint that will find crevices/wrinkles/etc.

I only spent a short while on this and had problems with focusing again but I could see well enough the effects I can get using the powder.(Much as I'd like)

These are the best shots I got, which is not to say that they're good. 

... and the obligatory, in normal-light shot.

... I don't really smile much.

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.

ID

This image is meant represent multiple aspects of the sort of things that go through my head at any given time. I'd say the end image represents maybe 50% of that but still, the image serves it's purpose and was a bit of fun for a friday night. :)

To do this all you need is a tripod, a remote trigger (timer will do though) and a modicum of talent at using whatever your image editing software of choice is.

I've always wanted to do somehing like this. I didn't really have any reason to do it as such but I did have the time and with no other inspirations to hand on a friday night I just had a play about.

Skull Logo Design Phase 3

Final design finished, this one was a little bit more ambitious than the last few, the feathers took a massive amount of time and it wasn't untill i'd finished delicately painting in the buffalo fur that it's not actually traditional on a normal indian headress. I was working from memory of a head dress i'd seen once.

I'm pretty happy with it however and the entire series of hats has been a fun run of concepts, there may be more in the future.

Skull Logo Design Phase 2

A scribble of the week should be following in the next coupkld of days. (A few weeks late)

In the mean time however is a further four more variants of the same skull logo design from my last update. There are still a few more variants i'm considering toying with before drawing a line under the series but i'm enjoying it so far.