Tag Archives: light trails

There Must Be An Angel Playing With Your Heart

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Once upon a time, a long long time ago, in an enchanted forest, there lived an angel with a big heart. In this modern version, the leaves are LEDs, the forest is i-City and the heart drawn by my assistant and model, Carmen.

This shot was done with her drawing the heart with a pair of LED lights held in each hand. We tried the LED light from two Samsung phones and it worked just as well. It should also work with torch-lights, glow sticks and sparklers.

The tricky part was figuring out the optimum time and speed to draw. Another challenge was in lighting up her face without too much ghosting since the FL-50R flash was fired in slow shutter sync. Light Painting is an established photography genre and art form. Hope to bring you more such pictures and share with you the techniques.

Olympus OM-D, ISO 200, f11, 1 sec.

There Must Be An Angel Playing With Your Heart

The Big Bang

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What is a Malaysian flower show without fireworks? After all, fireworks in Malay is ‘bunga api’ or fire flower. In Cantonese, it is ‘yin fah’ or smoke flower.

A flotilla of illuminated boats gathered on the lake at Floria Putrajaya 2013 as spectacular fireworks were set off. As with all major fireworks displays, there is one spectacular big bang at the end. This was when I decided to use a somewhat risky and nervy technique.

An exposure duration of 1/2 to 1 second is normally enough to blur the light trails of the fireworks nicely. I decided to go for a long 10-second exposure to capture the multiple bursts in a single shot. This is tough because with such a long exposures, the camera will trigger its dark-frame subtraction processing. You can turn it off but sensor thermal noise may ruin the image instead.

With it enabled, you effectively more than doubled the exposure time. It means standing around helpless for 30 seconds or more as the camera captures, processes and writes the image to the storage card. It is like waiting for a lifetime during a fireworks display.

That is OK but at a crowded place, a kid may grab one of your tripod legs in excitement or a camwhore might fire a flash ruining your shot. If that is not enough, the sky can also get very smoky towards the end of the display. If it at the end of it something screws up, the show will be probably be over. There is no second chance.

Olympus OM-D, ISO 200, f16, 10 sec.

The Big Bang

 

Live Time

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One of the coolest features in the Olympus OM-D camera is its Live Time Mode. With it, you can see a long exposure come to life as it happens. I wanted to add a little magic when photographing the hazy Petronas Twin Towers earlier tonight.

In Live Time Mode, I rotated the camera slowly while hand-holding it and monitored the result on the LCD screen. The car lights, street lights, traffic lights and building lights turned into circular streaks.

When I see the light trails and exposure becoming optimum, I clicked the shutter again to stop the exposure. Previously and with other cameras, B or Bulb Mode is a hit-and-miss or trial-and-error affair.

Live Time reminds me of the time when I was a kid developing prints in the darkroom and seeing the pictures come to life in the chemical trays. Sheer magic!

Olympus OM-D, ISO 200, f11, 8 secs.

Live Time