Luminous Time

I have to say, glow in the dark things are way too cool. I've been tray developing my film for the last couple goes, which involves staying in the dark room with no lights for about 20 minutes or so. By about the half way point, my eye's adjust to the dim light of....the glow of my watch and the timer in the room. Normally much too faint for you to see, you can actually use it to make out the edges of the trays. Pretty cool. Plus, the green light reflecting off all the watch parts just looks really freaking cool in the dark.

My first attempts at capturing the glow were not that successful. I used a really powerful light to charge up the glow, and then proceeded to light paint with that light. The image that resulted just looked like I'd taken a normal photo of the watch. Borings.

Next I tried with my phones LED, but the same result happened. The white light was just taking over the scene. :(

Then, I had an idea. What if, I painted with green light? I did a quick Google search, and found the green color of glow in the dark stuff. I set my phone to max brightness, and did my light painting with that! Brilliant results!

But now I had too much green. haha just can't win

At that point, I started mixing white light with the green light. My procedure was thus:

1. Charge glow with sun flashlight
2. Flash scene with white LED on photo
3. paint sides of watch with green for remainder of exposure (f/9 and 5s at ISO100)

It just really just a matter of getting the mixture just right, which took about 10 attempts.

I arranged the scene to look a little like a display. I wrapped the watch around a black leather filter case, which I had taken a +4 macro filter out of to put on my lens. The filter gave a softness to the photo, as well as a more shallow depth of field to play with.

Then I got everything into Lr. Got it all edited, and discovered that the second hand as over the Seiko logo...

:(

Back to shooting... 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3....

Got another good shot WITHOUT any of the hands attacking..

Essentially,  I just synced the settings from the previous photo. Which were was follows. 

I brightened the face of the watch to bring more detail into the numbering and logo. It was jut a little to dark in the original, but I couldn't light it more without toning down the effect of the glow in the dark parts. I wanted that contrast between the face and then hands/dots. But now the face was too dark, so I brightened that whole area. But now the glow in the dark parts were too bright...bugger!

With a little selective mousing, I toned down the hands just a bit to where I liked it. They're still bright, but not completely blown out. 

For the second photo, I went a little further. I felt there was a little too much green around the photo, so I made a round mask and added purple toning to it. This did not make the image look purple, just toned down the green. I did the same to the watch face (only slightly), and also raised the clarity. Just a hair though. Not much. 

I'm really happy with the results, it's pretty much as I imagined it. However, I wish I could figure out a better way than massive amounts of post to get the image to look the way I want. Maybe I experiment around some more in the future!

See you tomorrow!