We'd bought a set of clear battery powered LED Christmas lights online for $5 with the intent of making something suitable to use to create the light orb and finally we had a fullish moon on a clear night (although very windy unfortunately) so we headed down to Balls Head reserve (yes I know the irony of it all
) on Sydney Harbour to see what we could produce.For those not familiar with an Orb of Light and light painting at night...
We first need a few items in preparation:
- Tripod - we'll be doing very long exposures so we need something stable to hold the camera very steady
- Camera - set to a low ISO (to minimise noise and to assist with having a long shutter speed) - in this case ISO 100; we also want to use a long shutter speed (in the order of minutes) so we shoot in Full Manual Mode and set to Bulb mode
- Remote Timer Shutter Release - the programable timer I have allows me to set both a variable initial delay (which allows me to start things and then move into the image to the spot where I want to create the orb and start the light and start spinning before the exposure starts - otherwise you'd see a trail of light entering the frame to the orb) as well as a specific (long) shutter time
- Dark Clothes - so we don't appear in the images - we are constantly moving so we don't really "appear" in the long exposure however if we wore something bright the ambient light might light us up enough to leave a ghost image
- A Light Source - something small and portable (battery powered) with an on/off switch to use to create the orb of light itself in the image
Our First Orbs
As we were heading down towards the harbour anyway and it was still fairly early we first headed to just under the Sydney Harbour bridge near Luna Park. It was early evening and the moon was still low on the horizon so we were thinking of trying some images down there (perhaps with the moon it it).
The city and bridge are very well lit at night, as are the walkways near Luna Park so it was difficult to generate exposures of significant enough length without overexposure. We used a 3 stop hard graduated neutral density filter to try and reduce the exposure of all the city, bridge and some street and path lights but it was impossible to set the filter to do just what we wanted - we ended up doing the best we could and settled on 2 minute exposures. All the cars and buses driving through the area tended to shine bright lights directly into our scene as we were taking images both lighting the spinning person up and wrecking the exposure and even the bright streetlights were too brightly lighting everything up and in the end we gave it up as a lost cause for our first attempt and decided to move on.
We then drove over to Balls Head reserve where there are no street lights, houses or vehicles - basically no lights at all - ahh blissful darkness (sort of).
We did however still want to try and use the city as our backdrop so we again used the ND Grad to darken down the city lights as best we could and were able to use four minute exposures at around f/5.6. This provided the time to spin our orbs of light and not overexpose the city. It wasn't quite enough for the fullish moon to expose the landscape around us properly but you can start to see the effect and if we were to shoot some images of say 15 minutes or more I expect we'd have a very different look to the general landscape.
This is our first orb at Balls Head reserve - I muffed the orb a bit (shuffling about on the rock) but you can see what we were going for - we moved the tripod and changed the composition and did another here for which the orb was much better but the background composition and the lighting on the landscape and rocks was not as strong as this first image.
This second image is the last we took on the night and is at another location at Balls Head. This orb was spun by my daughter - she chose the spot to put the orb and she did the spinning work - and did a pretty great job
I may even have to try one of these out on the seaside (before dawn) the next time we do a seascape shoot...
