Light Fantastic

What you do with your Christmas lights before you put them back up in the loft.

Great fun.

Comments

[Oliver]

How did you achieve this affect?

[Rob]

It is actually quite easy. You need a camera which can take very long exposures (say 8 or so seconds). Set it to its slowest film speed and smallest aperture (if it lets you do manual) or set it for night time exposure without flash if it doesn't. Put the camera on a tripod or somewhere solid and just wave your lights around in front of the lens for as long as the shutter is open. If you dangle the lights from a string (like I did) you can get some quite nice effects.

Another way to take amazing looking shots is to set a slow shutter speed and just throw the camera up in the air during the shot. Flickr even have a special group, "cameratoss" for pictures taken like this, and some of them are amazing:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=cameratoss&w=all