Gizmodo Four Round Photo Challenge: Round 3

My short list of contenders for Round 4 of Gizmodo's shooting challenge.
I've already posted about these shots in full separately. UV1, UV2, Jar.

I picked the last Jar shot as it is sharpest and most vibrant I thought.
I got 2 Points putting me at joint second place at the end of Round 3. Only Round 4 to go, wish me luck!

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.

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.