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 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.

Gizmodo.co.uk's Four Round Photo Challenge: Round 2

So the GizmodoUK four-round photo challenge continues in to Round 2.

I did not rank high enough in Round 1 for points but still 3 more to play for.

This weeks selection to choose my best shot from are:

All of the above were shot in the earlier part of the week.

Towards the end of the week I begun planning to make use of a clear night at Durdle Door, I won't repost them here but my two considerations for putting forward was one of two shots

This shot of the Door itself with a beautifully colourful, Milky Way lit, sky as a backdrop...

 And the resulting entrant of the Milky Way over Man o' War Bay.

Hopefully I picked the right one to give me the best chances, would you have picked differently?

We shall see how I fare against the competition this week.

!!!UPDATE!!!
I managed to get a point this round. To see the competition and the results click here.
Now to work out what to shoot for Round 3.