Link to photos

I though rather than post the photos directly on the blog and spoil the reveal I would provide a link.

Final project photos

Eureka!

I've come up with a better idea for this project and I think I'll work much better than the mobile I made myself. I have a standard fan which I have decided I could adapt to make and moving mobile of sorts. It's one of those type of fans with a concentric circle cage, I can reverse the front half of the cage and strap it back to the propeller head itself and then I can tie elastic/string with LED lights from different parts of the cage. I can then remove the fan head from it's stand and perhaps hang it down forwards on elastic so its facing the floor with the lights hanging down.

Here are a few photo's of the actual fan:-





As you can see from the pictures I used cable ties to strap the cage back to the fan, not ideal in an aesthetic way but for this it's fine. Again it's not much to look at but I wanted to produce some still photographic light images to demonstrate the results, and in my mind it's about the results.

I did a few test photographs and they came out really well just with two lights. I'm not going to post them on this blog now as I want to pick out the best ones to print out when the unit is fully functional.

Light Tests

I thought that I would do some early tests with a couple of lights just to see how the mobile will work.

Here are the results:-






I'm not entirely happy with the results, i think I need to maybe think again about how to make the images better.

Building The Mobile

I have now built the mobile and whilst it's not looking too professional it is a functional item.

Here are some photo's of the actual piece:-

Initial sketch ideas

I have been working on some initial sketch ideas and a few thoughts that I have had on how the piece will look in reality. Here are a few drawings of my early development ideas:-


This first idea I think is a bit restrictive because of the elastic being attached at both ends of the frame. Unless I get the correct tension of elastic the balls will not really move much, therefore restricting the quality of pictures that can be produced.


The second idea I think will produce better results than the first idea, however, as with the first idea my main concern is how cumbersome the framework will be, I wanted to keep the size to a minimum because cost cutting and transportation issues.


The third idea seemed like the best option for my abilities and I decided to buy the materials to begin construction. I did a few simple tests with the LED's and ping pong balls to see how the photos came out. After doing these tests I decided that the ping pong balls were going to cause me all manner of problems. The first issue I found was that of cutting and preparing of the balls, they looked a bit shapeless once I had cut into them and messed with their integrity. The second issue that I came across was that once the light was in the ball the intensity was lessened. This meant that the light that the camera picked up was less like a trail and more just like a glowing blob which to some extent produced undesirable results in my mind.

Ideas

My main project idea was to construct something that can produce random light art for photos. I had in mind a frame with lights suspended on elastic. The person could then come along and spring the lights around and take random photos of the piece. On reflection I want to try and simplify this idea even more.

Another thought I had was to use a fan and get all the ping pong balls and put the lights in them and then you could throw in random colour balls and adjust the speed of the fan making the ball heights change and pulsate differently. In the trial I did of this method my fan wasn't strong enough to the move the balls and therefore it unfortunately didn't work out the way I wanted. It's a real shame because I think this would work out really well if I had a strong enough fan source. I would probably need to utilise something like the fan in a leaf blower.

I think my final idea will be a mobile, whilst it's not a very interesting idea, it's not about the piece itself it's about the photos and film that come from it.

New camera

We have just got a new camera and I thought I would try it out and take some light pictures just to see how they differ from the previous camera we had. This camera has a lot more settings and adjustments that I can fiddle with to create light art. I can change the shutter speed to 1 second which means I should get some reasonable trails of light.

I have also got for some LED's lights, high intensity, in red, orange, yellow and green and some Maxell CR2032 lithium batteries.

I used the specification for the items as per a tutorial on the internet for another type of light art that people do.

http://www.instructables.com/id/LED-Throwies/

The main issue with the method that I have chosen is that you can't switch the lights off, you have to just to unstick them, but because they last for about 3 days, I should be fine. During practice I will just stick with 4 LED's, one of each colour and then the rest will remain fresh for when it comes to my full demonstration.

Anyway here are some photos:-