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

Jervois Quay, Wellington

Since getting access to a client's rooftop for shooting downtown Wellington I've had little chance to put together many of the panoramas. Here's a shot of Jervois Quay that has made it out of the gate however:

-j

Retrospective

Recently a client requested a piece from my Art School graduating year. I've unearthed these black and white mural prints and put them on the site for perusal. They were created using Imagine 2.0 running on an Amiga 4000 in 1995. I output the resulting renders to a newspaper style line-film negative process and then enlarged onto large format black and white photographic paper from there.

Otago Polytech School of Art had a custom enlarger built for this purpose. I recall thinking that it looked like a sort of a steampunk inspired wooden train engine built from toilet-rolls and all sorts of odds and ends... it was on rails to facilitate focusing and different enlargements. I had to roll the resulting prints through large open PVC pipe toughs to develop and fix them. It was a lot of fun!

-J

Take a look... click on any of the thumbnails to go to the gallery and see the rest:

Gizmodo photo contests

Gizmodo have been running shooting challenges for a little while now covering different techniques and subject matter... the latest being the self portrait. I'm finding the collection of ideas is fascinating with some really good entries - things that make me want to try it out - take a look:

gizmodo.com

-j

Here's a couple of examples: