#5 looks like a cathedral window, that could work for xmas.

I personally like #11 the best. looks like a long exposure shot of flying sparks

Thanks. That first one was a 20 second exposure, so it was hard to get at a decent level of clarity - people naturally can't hold perfectly still for 20 seconds - but the long exposure gives the photo a really cool look.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'lichtfaktor, lightwriting, london, street' to 'lichtfaktor, lightwriting, london, street, long exposure, photography, stop motion' - edited by lucky760

Loved it. So creative.

I think this is done by waving an LED around to trace out a shape in mid-air with the camera's exposure time set to roughly the time taken to trace out the shape once. So every time the camera captures an image it captures the entire outline that has been traced out using the bright LED. The quality of the animation created in this manner is greatly influenced by the person's ability to trace out the same shape over and over again consistently.

I found the shots where the camera is moving the down the hallway really impressive. In these shots they are able to capture the traced LED outlines (suggests the use of long exposure) and yet the background doesn't blur out when the camera moves (which would happen with a moving camera if your exposure was too long). They must have played around with the brightness of the leds, the amount of ambient light in the scene, the exposure time, and speed of movement until they had it nailed down. Or maybe I missing something. Obviously the people who made this video think the moving camera shots are impressive too since they play those shots several times back and forth.

(cross posted with a related video that has a similar take on this same multicamera setup; http://www.videosift.com/video/Surround-Long-Exposure-Shots-Blurred-in-3D-Tiga-promo )

(cross posted with a related video that has a similar take on the use of multiple cameras and long-exposure; http://www.videosift.com/video/Blurred-Long-Exposure-Still-Investigated-in-3D )

Fun quick and easy DIY setup for messing about, but... x-ray? I assume you added that for effect (grab people's attention and whatnot). Near-infrared is certainly no where near x-ray, and I bet the majority of the videosift crowd would call you out on this (smart bunch of folks).

This setup will selectively block the majority of whats maybe below 550nm and depending on your camera sensor and built in filter you're going to get maybe up to 850nm showing up with long exposures (solidly above visual spectrum, which ends around 760nm).

I've been toying with replacing the internal filter of an old camera with a clear filter (which doesn't block IR light) for literally 3 years (I cut up some glass slides from the lab and tried to make it the right size to replace the filter, but got busy with my research and have stayed too busy to mess with photography much). This easy setup has its problems, like the large hotspot of white in many of the pictures and a softening of focus, but its so quick and easy that it could provide an afternoon of fun.

oh, and the midi music is hilarious and awesome

Yes, the dots that don't move are light sensor 'noise' from long-ish exposures with a consumer grade digital camera. Actually, even very expensive digital cameras will have this problem with long exposures (5-30 sec). It has to do with a dark signal (low-light) being recorded differently by some sensors due primarily to electrical noise and differences in the light sensitive photosites (... this is my understanding at least).

If you also have the same problem with low light images on your own project (which you very likely will) and if you were so inclined you could apply a median filter to all images before making them into a video clip ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_filter ). You'll have to monkey with it a little if you're shooting something like stars, though.

Photoshop and other photo editor programs can do this for you, by 'recording' what you apply to an image, then tell it to apply the same recorded technique to all images in a folder (so you really only do it once, then go and make some dinner).

I would also advize setting the exposure manually, if you can, at a level that permits enough detail in low-light but also avoids collecting piles of background noise.

An aside; digital cameras with physically large image sensors are said to be better at avoiding noise problems (so a 7MP camera that has a very small chip will be much noisier than a 5MP camera with photosites that are physically larger and spread further apart).