Falling Light

Rather an odd photo tonight, it was just a random idea I had and so I went for it. I have this little camp light thingy, it's a single LED inside a frosted plastic housing. Not super bright, but enough that 15s at ISO100 and f5.6 captures enough illumination. In other words....it's really freaking underpowered.

Anywho, I had the idea to hold the light in my hand, and then create this string of motion blur up to my face. It'll make sense once you see it...

First attempt:

Yeahhhhh, not so much. I mean I like it...but there's a whole lot of things wrong with ti. First, everything is blurry. Everrrryyythingg. That can be cool for some things, but for this I just don't think it really works.

Second, that UA logo. Enough said.

Third, I have no face....and not enough blur that it could be seen that my face is falling into the light.

Fourth, can you say underexposed? This is even edited +3 EV and it's still way dark. This one was at 6s.

Given all these thing's wrong, I went back to the camera and tried again. I added 7s to the exposure time to make it brighter, and I also rearranged my set up  a bit to try to get better focus on me. I manual focused through live view onto the stool I sat upon, in a hope that I would be in the same focal plane.

Second attempt..

Much better! I have a face! Yay, and I even have little light tears coming from my eyes! Way cool.

The motion blur is better, much brighter and in the right place, it looks like my face is draining.

The brightness is better, it's pretty dang close to proper exposure with bright whites.

After swapping my shirt inside out, no more UA logo!

But it's still blurryyyy. gahhhhhhh...

Maybe it's the long exposure that's doing it? That's definitely part of it....and it's out of focus. I can tell that much too. So...let's change a few things.

First, I set up a strobe with a grid on it. This lit my face, which created a frozen image. No more motion blur on this to screw it up. That part of the blur equation was taken care of.

Next, I plugged in my remote trigger and set the camera to auto focus. I sat down in my stool and focused on my eye ish location of my facial body part. Close enough. Next...

I moved the light a little closer, so that it would be brighter on me compared to the background, and so the beam could be more contracted to just me. Kill two birds with one stone. The power output had to be dropped a bit, but that's perfect. If you didn't catch my discussion on light position v brightness, read it here.

With that set up, I took a few more frames, and came up with this. For clarification, I tripped the shutter, the flash went off, then I slowly bent down toward the light for the remainder of the exposure.

Much, much better. Pretty much what I'd envisioned for the photo! Rarely happens like that. For editing, I did a few little adjustments. First, I brightened the reds, orange, and yellows. This brightened my face and face blur, so it stood out from the background a little more. Then I went into my hair and blurred it, just to make it a little less distracting. I think that's it though!

See you tomorrow!