Adventures In Light Writing

My kids have been a little obsessed with their Crayola Glow Station this week.  (Read my review here.)  They ask every single night after dinner if they can play with it.  It only works in the dark so the half hour after dinner before they start getting ready for bed is the best.

Last night after I put Hannah to bed we started experimenting with the light pen and my camera.  I think the pictures would have come out better if the light weren't so bright but alas, I just put new batteries in yesterday.  Maybe I'll try a smaller aperture next time.  We got our best results at a 4 second exposure but 5 seconds gave us more time to make a picture.  Next time I'm trying it with glow sticks.

Here are our best efforts.

Christopher's Spiral

My Spiral

Stacy's Heart

AmyB's Name

My Smile

One more here.  Totally fun and we'll definitely play around with this again.

EDIT:  My friend Jen asked me to post the instructions on this project.  Here's how we did it.

First, I set my camera on the table in our dining room.  If we had more space I would have used a tripod but the table was the perfect height.

Next, with the lights on, I focused on where my sister was kneeling with the light pen.  The dark confuses the camera so I switched to manual focus to keep it from trying to re-focus in the dark.

Then we turned out all the lights in the house.  There was still some light coming in from the window behind the camera but since I wasn't planning on this being a blog post I didn't try to make it perfect :-)

We experimented with aperture settings and shutter speeds.  The camera was set at f/7 for most of these shots and at a five-second shutter speed.  I liked the results best at four-seconds but it wasn't enough time to paint more than a heart or star.  

One more thing.  We used the 2-second shutter delay.  It gave a nice warning to begin "painting" and prevented camera shake while pressing the shutter.  Once the camera gave a little beep and the shutter opened the artist (me, my sister, my friend AmyB and Christopher) had five seconds to draw a picture with the light pen.  These are the best of about 25 attempts.

You can see some really cool light writing here.  I didn't actually research before trying this.  I don't know how real light writing is done (and I don't have time to find out right now because my kids and their cousin are running around the house like feral animals) but I want to find out and try this again.  Maybe next time I'll use light sticks or LED lights.