I recently had a lot of fun playing around with the delayed flash capabilities of my camera. The basic idea is that the camera takes a long exposure and then flashes at the very end to capture the action and give you a crisp picture, with the most pronounced lights being blurred. If you have ever seen a photo of a car that is in perfect focus, but you see a trail of light from the brake lights, you have seen the results of this trick. I thought I would have some fun and try it out by giving my son a bunch glow bracelets, and letting him jump around on the bed. The result is something like this:
If you want to do something similar, here are some tips that I learned in the process of doing this:
- Use a tripod. Since you will be taking a pretty long exposure, using a sturdy tripod is essential
- Set your camera to use a delayed flash. On Olympus E-Series cameras it is called slow2. Most DSLRs should have this capability so look at your instruction manual to find the right setting.
- Find a very dark area. We tried it at first outside, but there was enough moonlight for this to not be effective. Using a dark backdrop also helps the colors pop out.
- Open up the aperature. A higher aperature (lower number) will let light in easier and help your light source (in this case glow bracelets) show up better. Most of these shots were shot at f2.8.
- It is okay to overexpose your shot in these instances to get longer exposure times. Most of these shots were shot at +1ev – +2ev to give Charlie more time to jump around.
- Turn on noise reduction (if you have it) on the camera. Long exposures will most certainly add a lot of noise to the photo. Using noise reduction will get rid of most of that noise.
- You can buy a canister of 15 glowsticks at Michael’s for $1!
- Have fun!
But I think it was a good experience, nonetheless.
