Swing on the spiral...

Tonight, I wanted to do another shot inspired by DPS. DPS is still a great go-to source for ideas, inspiration and questions. If you aren't already reading their articles, I really recommend it.

The shot is done by suspending a light source above a vertically oriented camera. It's set into motion and then you shoot the resulting pattern with blub mode. Sounds simple enough, right?

Here's my version of this shot:



I used a three-led light, with three gels on it. A blue and green each covering one of the outer bulbs, and then a soft white over all three bulbs. I hadn't planned on using the soft white one, but even at the max aperture on my lenses (f/22) everything blew out to near white with even a few seconds of exposure.

The focus might also be a bit rough, but I had the camera literally a few inches off the floor on my Gorillapod, so trying to establish a good focus was really tricky. I think this is actually in focus, but the lack of crispness can be attributed to both flaring from the strong light pointed right at the lens, and the use of the kit lens. I had to shoot this at around 24mm focal length, as the 50mm could not give me a large enough field of view to get a nice large swing pattern. Smaller patterns did not give the definition I wanted, so the kit lens was a must-use in this scenario.

All in all, a fun shot, but it took a lot longer to setup and execute than expected!