Light Spirals

This work by Adam M is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

I hung a little light from the ceiling, with an extra weight on the line, then spun them around, and took a photo from underneath. I've seen a lot of people achieve much better results from this sort of thing.

Pentax K-x - 20 sec - f/? - ISO 200 - ~15mm

Small LED light.

Used GIMP to adjust levels (dropping out the very dim light on the ceiling) and then used threshold to get rid of blue tinges on the edges of the narrower streaks. Cropped, scaled and watermarked.

It turned out to be harder than I'd expected. I frequently wound up with the light swinging backwards and forwards, rather than around, giving just a line, rather than a spiral. When it did swing nice and wide the light pointed too far out to the side and didn't get enough light on the camera. I think this could be fixed by adding a longish diffuser on the end of the light. These lines seem a bit bumpy, where others look smooth. Maybe I was launching with too much force, but I needed to to get it to swing wide. Maybe I shouldn't have been using such a wide lens.