Okay, it is time to explain what I am doing here.

These photo experiments are an extension of those ‘wiggly light’ photos I was taking when I visited my mom in the Bay Area for Christmas. I was taking pictures of the tree. The room was pretty dark. That kept my shutter open longer, trying to find light. And I didn’t hold still enough in a few of the pictures. I liked the way those turned out, so I started playing with the idea.

So, I have these spinning 3-D light disks left over from my… uh… the… ummm… the days of my less-than-responsible-youth, shall we say?

If you put them on a flat surface in a dark room and spin them while shining a light down on them, they are really trippy to look at…

Especially if you are on… I mean ‘in’… yeah… in the right state of mind.

They make light stand up and dance, so to speak. I figured I could try my ‘wiggly light’ photo idea on them.

As is usual with my ideas, there were a few problems. The one that has the paperclip design… yeah, I don’t know why they went with paperclips either, or why I got that one… seems to have been worn and scratched to a point where the magic is almost gone.

I got a few interesting shots with it.

But it isn’t as good as the other disk. Here was the main problem. What I learned at my mom’s house was that the wiggly pictures work best on colored lights that are not too close and not too far away. They work best at the distance of half the length of my mom’s street, as measured from her house to the top of the hill. And they work best with a zoom lens.

I was alone, and I had to hold a flashlight over the disks to make the light magic work.

So there I was, standing in my dark kitchen, flashlight in one hand, camera in the other, trying to wiggle the camera and hold the flashlight at the right height and angle.

So I didn’t get exactly what I was going for, but as I said in the first post, I may have learned a few things… like waiting until my younger daughter comes home from college to hold the flashlight for me… and I did try some other experiments, which I will share soon. See ya!