Tipster of the Week: Fiber Optics Are Good for Your Health

The process of making Lomographs is just like painting itself. We choose what to shoot with our cameras, as well as the painter decides on what scene he’ll make with his brush. Both Lomographer and painter are two artists that are aiming for one similar thing – to make beautiful pictures. And for this week, see how our Tipster chose to paint with light, literally.

Not All Smoking is Hazardous to Your Health by kylethefrench

You can smoke indoors with the right tools and cameras – make that smoke with light!

I have been enjoying the fun of fiber optic light toys for years but recently an idea hit me like a lightning bolt dead out of the sky. See, so I have had a couple different of these fiber optic toys over my life and every time the base of them are broken. This always made me sad and so I just thought that when the base lights burned out that they were done.

The brilliant idea though was, well, what if I just take the fiber optic bundle out of the toy and use a flashlight as the lighting instrument instead of the base? And you wouldn’t know it, but it actually worked! What is even better is that you can put a color gel between the flashlight and the base of the fiber optic bundle to make the bundle tinted with whatever shade you want. The possibilities are endless!

I love it best with a B setting camera in a darkened room. You could do this technique easily with a Holga 135BC, the Lomo LC-A, or with a Fisheye 2 and with just any kind of film camera that has B setting or long exposure function! So you take the fiber optic bundle and place it over the flashlight and gel. Now, it is good to get a glove to wear on the hand that you are using to hold the whole thing that way you can cover up the connection area real well so that flashlight’s light won’t escape and get into your picture. What this does is it gives you many tiny points of dim light instead of the one bright streak of light. You can move the fiber optic bundle around and everywhere it goes, it creates light in the image. For the very smoky effect, you should use your other gloveless hand to fan out the bundle of light points and always keep them moving in all different ways; this is the key to the smoke.

So anyways, I demand that you go and try this out for yourself. You can find low cost fiber optic bundles online when you by fiber optic toys or you can even go down to a urban junk store and buy one of those fiber optic flower arrangements for like 99 cents and just use the flower bundle, cut the flower petals out if you want, it’s up to you! And more importantly, you should be enjoying what you’re doing!

written by kylethefrench on 2010-03-14 #gear #tutorials #long-exposure #tips #toys #tipster #led #b-setting #light-writing #colorsplash-gels #fiberoptic #tipter-of-the-week