Hello world! I'm finally back. ...I'm not even going to get into all the reasons (excuses) why this has taken so long to get around to. Instead, I'm just going to get right to it... So, how do you spin an orb?
In my blogging hiatus, I found that there are actually several ways of creating an orb effect when light painting. I'm just going to cover the basics here, to get you started. But, once you understand the basic idea, you can get creative and find other ways to create the effect.
The first thing you are going to need is a light source. There are a lot of different options, but your best bet is some sort of LED light, ball, or stick that you can attach to a rope, string, chain, wire, etc. In the future (hopefully not the distant future) I'll post some D.I.Y. ways to make light brushes and light painting tools. But, for now, I'll keep it real basic. I got everything I used to spin the orb shown above at the 99 cent store...
I just got a cheap little flashing LED stick and tied it to a 3' length of nylon rope. The LED bike light is what I used as my target. if you look at the image of the orb, you will notice that I have the LED bike light sitting under the center of the orb and I did this to help illustrate my point...
As far as camera gear goes... As with all long exposure photography, you'll need a tripod (or something solid and sturdy to position your camera on) to shoot orbs. Your settings will all depend on your environment and the type of light you are spinning with. I'm shooting with an old Canon 40D. So I usually keep my settings at a 15 - 20 second exposure, with my ISO around 600 - 1000 and my aperture around 4 - 8. But it's hard to say what will work best with the environment and LED variables. So my best advice is to just experiment and play with your settings till you get the color and intensity you want out of your LEDs.
The main idea behind spinning an orb is that you need to spin multiple circles while moving around a central axis that all the circles connect at. It's almost like winding a piece of string around a ball. The best way that I have found to do this is by standing on the edge of an imaginary circle on the ground and spinning the LED light over the center of the circle as you walk around the edge of the circle. I drew a not so beautiful illustration of the process, to help clarify what I mean.
What you have in the illustration are 2 views of the path you need to follow in order to create the orb effect with just 4 spins. The view on the left is a head on view and the smaller one on the right is an overhead view. I used different colors to represent the 4 angles that you need to spin the LEDs in. The numbers, with the corresponding colors on them, indicate where around the circles edge you need to stand as you spin. The number sequence is to show the different points along the path that you need to stop at as you move around the circle.
So, basically, what I do, as I spin, is take a step to the left after every spin until I have moved all the way around my center point and I try to keep the LED spinning in a vertical path. If you let the LED spin in a slightly horizontal path, the circles won't meet at the axis. The crooked paths take away from the orb effect and make orbs look sloppy. You can see in the example I used above that the orb has some crooked lines in the middle that almost look like the letter V, and that the last spin pulled far away from the axis point. Too much of this will turn your obr into a blob. Which is why I came up with the idea of having a target light to help me practice spinning. What you do is spin your LED and try to make sure it crosses directly over your target on every spin, as you step around the circle.
As soon as I can get my little ninja to help me, I will make some video tutorials on how to spin the different types of orbs that I have learned to create. Then you can see how silly I look in the process. Lol. If your orbs don't look like an orb, when you start trying to spin orbs, don't get discouraged! It takes some practice to get control and a good understanding of how to step while spinning the LEDs, before you'll get a perfect orb. But it really isn't about spinning the perfect orb as much as it is about having fun and being creative. So just have fun and experiment. Who knows... you might even stumble across a new way to spin an orb or a new type of orb all together!
I'll be posting a lot of the light painting that I did over the past year, soon, and will continue to teach what I have learned, here on this blog. So, check back for more Bsombin', and more light painting and long exposure photography.
