More Funky Lights

I took some more Palaroids recently for my Polaroid Lights project. As with the previous photos, these Polaroids were made with multiple exposures of a point source of light in a dark room, some of them long exposures with camera movement, and others stationary. Focus and distance to the light source were also varied.

These photos are not of a Christmas tree, as before, however, but of 'On' lights on electronic devices. The red is from a surge protector, and the green light featured prominently here is on a computer speaker.

I liked funky effect so much after the first time so much that I just had to find some other lights to use the technique on. I love how the different lights create and entirely different look with the same technique. The Christmas tree pictures have a decidedly festive feel, while these have more of a cool techno feel.

The second picture from the bottom even has lines reminiscent of sound waves -- appropriate since the green light is on a speaker!

Now I'm addicted, and looking for my next fix. If I see some interesting lights in a dark room I'm going to pull out my Polaroid and fire away!

Check out all the photos.

Polaroid New Years

With no ill New Years Eve party to go to, I decided to make my own--with my Polaroid!

...and my Christmas tree.

I recently acquired a Polaroid Countdown M80 land camera, and it's popped the cork on all sorts of vintage instant print fun. A precission instrument it is not, but with a little imagination, serendipity and Polaroid magic cool things can happen.

Exposure control is limited to a little 'lighter / darker' dial on the lens, but in low light (a room with only a Cristmas tree on qualifies) the shutter speeds get pretty long.

And because this is a pack film camera where you pull out the film manually -- as opposed to the 600 type of Polaroid that growls and spits the thing out automatically -- you can easily do multiple exposures.

You can keep cocking the shutter and firing frames off to your heart's content before yanking the tab--how cool is that! You just keep cocking the shutter and firing away until you see fit to yank the tab and see what you got.

In all the excitement I kind of lost track of excttly how many exposures I made on each frame. I'd say some of these pics might have as many as 10-20 exposures. I turned out the lights and made exposures of my Christmas tree with a variety of techniques.

For some exposures I held the camera steady, for others I swirled it, twirled it, and swung it to make light trails. For some I held the camera right in front of a bulb and pulled it away quickly with the shutter open.

Some shots were in sharp focus while others were thrown completely out to get some nice big colorful blobs (bokeh if you're one of those people that uses the term).

I did some pictures with my 'real' camera too, but you can't get pictures like this with a digital camera. Sure, you can use Photoshop to make a composite from multiple exposures, but without the serendipitous magic of the instant print it just wouldn't be the same.

So long story short; I stayed up way past my bedtime playing around with this fun stuff on new years. Hope you like it!

If you like this, you might also enjoy this post and this post.

See more cool stuff on my Flickr.

Fall Again

I posted some of the individual photos back in the fall when I took them, but I started thinking they would make a good grid; all the photos were done essentially the same, but no two are alike. No two leaves fall the same way.

I made these pictures by taking a variety of fallen leaves from my back yard and dropping them in front of the camera during a long exposure.

I had two strobes: one set to fire on first-curtain sync and one on second-curtain sync. A tungsten hot light provided the slightly warm blurred streak of color in between the two (mostly) sharp exposures. Some photos were done with only one of the flashes.