Last Friday night Tito and I were invited to our artist friends house for dinner and creativity! To add to the night I brought the camera and a collection of glow sticks, sparklers and bubble mix.

Sadly, breaking tubes of glow sticks and pouring them into bubble mix completely failed to produce glowing bubbles, as I optimistically hoped it would.  First I added enough glow stick ooze that the mixture glowed brightly, but was now unable to produce actual bubbles. So I added more soap. Bubbles, but no glow. So I added more glow and got…. glow but no bubbles.

This cycle continued until my friends gently told me to lay off – partly because my friends kitchen looked like I had slaughtered an alien on her counter.

We settled for using the remaining glow sticks and bulb exposures on the camera to have a little light painting fun. Here’s how you do it!

1. Put the camera on a tripod
2. Set the exposure to ‘BULB’ – this means that as long as your shutter button is pressed (or in this case, as long as your remote release is locked) the shutter will remain open.
3. Attach your remote release and set a 10 second timer on the shutter to give you time to get into position.
4. Make sure your ISO is 100 – the exposure may blow out otherwise.
5. Lock the shutter, go nuts with the glow sticks and when you’re done, hide the sticks and go turn off the camera.
6. Laugh at/admire your results ;)

And a fire breathing dragon (we were especially proud of this one)

And a house (portal) tree (mushroom cloud) and sun (evil glowing ball of menace).

Then we got a little creepy, dropped the dragon and went for fire breathing friends.

And crazy nebulous zombie friends.

And then we opened up the sparklers and went for glowing ball of light encased friends.

This was all watched by the cat who, despite the normal propensity of cats to run around after things that glow, seemed uniquely unimpressed with our antics.

Thank you Catharine, for a wonderful, artsy, liberating and fun evening!