Friday, June 25, 2010

Long-exposure LED fun

Inspired by my intrepid friend Brian, I decided to order some LED's for a little long-exposure style imagery. This involved acquiring some automotive LED head and tail-light replacement bulbs as they provide good omni-directional light throw and excellent brightness at economical power usage rates compared to typical incandescent bulbs. LEDStuff.co.nz have a great range of replacement bulbs at
good prices so I got three colours including white, red and blue. These arrived the next day and the only other thing required was some power which I could get from the supermarket!

The LED's all required 12v so I connected 2x6v lantern batteries in serial and the resulting current gives me a long-lasting light and makes the whole thing highly portable:


The white light is the brightest mostly due to being intended for headlamp replacement. But the red gives a nice spectral response with a hot orange center and a red trailing effect it seems.

I used some leftover speaker wire as the means by which to swing the LED about.

I tried ball-shaped spinning patterns over about 12 seconds and found it difficult to get a properly spherical effect, but the results were encouraging... then when thinking about other forms that could be created I hit on the 'time-tunnel' effect. By walking backwards away from the camera during the exposure and spinning the LED on it's speaker wire tether, I managed to open the portal to the next dimension!:


That's me in the centre in warp-form gauging whether to jump though or not!

-j

3 comments:

  1. Portal? No way...that's a freakin great big "O" for Oresome!!

    Oh man...I have soooo many funky ideas for this stuff but you've just given me about a zillion more. Waiting for time machine to take me ahead a couple of weeks so that I can join the fun.

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