Thought I'd experiment with light to fulfill one of my aims for 2009, hence some harmless bordered eye-candy. I had great fun for the first 15 shots, then it became a bit of a chore because of the high failure rate. In the end I set the camera to take 5 consecutive shots at 30s exposure rather than individual shots as it was quicker. Earlier attempts had a very busy and regular background, but I gradually moved towards simpler, more random versions. There is a lens flare (blue blur) which I had to compromise on if I wanted to keep the top and bottom 'star' effects. It's a shame I couldn't clone it out.
Technicals: 40W lightbulb through a dimmer switch with LED light moved behind. The LED didn't need WB correction and cost $2 at Fry's last time I was in the States (it's a torch on a keyring). Additional red lighting from the left. I glued a metal rod to the back of the bulb and had to make sure the white light didn't cross it otherwise it would show (like it did in the 100 or so other attempts).
Post-processing: rotate 2 degrees, crop, double USM, contrast, brightness, resize for submission, re-sharpen, border. Because there's so much black it allowed the bulb to retain a lot of detail and still keep to the 150kb limit.
Estimate: 6.1 to 6.3 (unless the eye-candy police give it a shoeing!!)
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Nice! I love the red spots. What's the little blue thing NW of the lightbulb? What's the setup for this? I'd love to try playing with something like this in the future. Nice job.
Awesome shot, very well executed. Too bad you can't spot edit for the challenge because we can kind of make out the holder and there's that top blue spot there too. 8
I like this a lot, but you may find that some will say that the bulb is the main subject and that it isn't producing any light. As far as I'm concerned it meets the challenge though. Good work.
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