Light Painting at the Camera Club

 Excellent evening at the Cambridge Camera Club Special Interest Group - Wednesday Workshop. Light Painting - Thank you Paul and Charles 

Light Painting at the Cambridge Camera Club Wednesday Workshop

Last Wednesday we spent the evening Light Painting at the Wednesday Workshop. Paul and Charles again put great effort into making this annual event enjoyable.

This year I took my Olympus OMD EM1mkii camera. This has a special long exposure mode called Live Composite. Basically you work out the base exposure for the image, in this case with no 'Light Painting' and then set the camera to take a series of shots at that exposure. The clever part of the camera 'software' is that it ONLY records where 'light' has changed. The background image maintains the same exposure you first set.

Most of these shots were taken at ISO200, Aperture at f/6.3 and shutter speed at 0.5 Sec. The composite was then combined with about 20 - 25 exposures.

I am guessing you could create the same effect on a 'normal camera' mode and combining the 20 images in Photoshop as layers, creating a smart object from these layers and then choosing Layers / Smart Objects / StackMode / Mean. The last image in this blog is a combination of 4 images in this way and seems to work. Need to experiment a bit more.

The Light painting was achieved with Home Made LED wands and wire wool that had been ignited.

The Image of the person running was created by a young lady member drawing the figure with a LED  Torch - very cleaver :)

CCC Wednesday Workshop - Movement

Last Wednesday the Cambridge Camera Club met for their normal Wednesday Workshop Special Interest Group. This time Paul and Charles had us in the field playing with Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) and 'The Orton Effect' - this is where you take two photos with second photo out of focus and then blended back with the in focus image to create a dreamy effect.

An interesting evening.

The Orton Effect

The first four images show the Orton Effect (sort of). The first three of these show:-

1. The Infocus Image.
2. The out of focus image
3. The combined images 'In Camera' (I was using my Olympus OMD EM1 mkii)
4. The forth image was an image duplicated in photoshop with the the second image with Gaussian Blur

 Intensional Camera Movement (ICM)

You will have seen on my blog that I quite like playing with ICM. I don't often think about rotating the camera, I normally just go up and down or side to side. I tried a bit of both. The success rate is very low. The images here are ones that please me, I am not saying they are 'great' are a result of about 250 photos taken. I have included a non moving image in some instances.

Up and Down

 Round and Round

I then put my fish eye on. Just a slight movement in the central position can make an interesting difference.

I decided to try and blend in Photoshop a Non Movement Image with one with movement. I was playing around with the blending modes and just tried 'subtraction' and got a pleasing result. Two there, one in colour and one in monochrome. Not sure which I prefer.

ICM with Flash 

I then tried a circular movement with a burst of flash to start with.

Jedi Knight Phil 

 ....then swung is Light Sabres