The Story Behind the Photo

July 2024: Abstract

Monica Matti Miller

I never experimented with lights and photography other than the sun and flash, and I want to explore a little more during the monthly assignment “abstracts”.  I was looking for LED lights that I can attach to a horse lunge whip and play with it, but searching on Amazon I came across a frisbee with LED lights.  Let’s try this! Once we got it, we started to investigate what we could do with it. I asked Joshua to play with it in the dark outside our house and then the magic happens! We were very surprised with the results, different shapes and lines depending on how he was throwing it. We also could change colors of the frisbee, as well as use just white LEDs.

Camera and lens used: Sony ILCE-7C + FE-28-60 F4-5.6

Exposure was between 10 to 30 seconds. When using 30 seconds I covered the lens when Joshua dropped the frisbee on the ground, so I only got lights when it was in the air. (Thanks Kathy for this trick when discussing fireworks).

Camera setting: 10 secs exposure at f 9.0 aperture and 50 ISO and 30 seconds exposure at f 13 aperture and 50 ISO

Once I had multiple images I combined them in Photoshop, but I noticed the image was too flat, so I used different levels of gaussian blur in the middle and back layer to create distance between the white shapes and the background.

For the composition, the first photo I worked on had multiple white lights across it, but my eyes were all over the place and I couldn’t stop and focus on something, so I simplified it by placing the closest lights on the left of the image, since it looks like something was walking to the right.

I kept a lot of the images captured during this exercise,  since they will be a perfect way to add backgrounds to future photos as well as drawing around them when working on digital art.

Another thanks to RHPC for pushing me to try new things!