Recently, a camera club that I follow did a workshop on light painting. Without realizing it, I had done this years ago when taking photos of people playing with sparklers on Fourth of July. The workshop looked like it was a lot of fun and I was intrigued. For Mike's birthday, his mom bought him (us) a huge metal whirleygig. (I had no idea that was a real term until this past Friday.) We also discovered that it has solar powered LED lights. Sunday evening we sat outside around our first fire of the year with the double-sided whirleygig spinning freely. When the lights came on I thought, 'I wonder what that would look like in a photo?' So at 10:30 pm, while Mike relaxed around the fire, I started playing with my camera! Below are some of my favorite images of my whirleygig light painting experiment.
This is the whirleygig. It is double-sided and each propeller spins independently from the other. The whole top also rotates. Each propeller has 9 LEDs on the outside and 3 LEDs on the inside.
3 second exposure
6 second exposure
6 second exposure
6 second exposure with a slight rotation
6 second exposure with full rotation while spinning
6 second exposure with some rotation and slowing spin
6 second exposure - I stepped into the frame to rotate the whirleygig - my ghost image is on the left side!
6 second exposure
4 second exposure - the back propeller started to wind down and actually reverse direction
2 second exposure
6 second exposure
6 second exposure
3 second exposure
1 second exposure
