Lighttrailer V1.0
Long exposures turn a moving light into a single drawn line. I wanted a bigger pen, so I built a five-metre one.
The idea is old and simple. Open the shutter, move a light through the dark, and the camera records the whole path as one continuous stroke — a light trail. The only part worth engineering was the light itself. So that is the part I made.
The rig was two hundred RGB LEDs mounted on an extendable fishing pole, five metres at full stretch. Cordless, remote-controllable and waterproof — the last of which is only sensible for a night shoot. The whole thing took about thirty minutes to put together. That same night I took it out for a little midnight shoot.
The photographs ended up in a Flickr set. The rig then found a second job: a photo shoot with the Independent Ballet Wales, up in the Welsh mountains. It is called V1.0, which is the kind of naming that quietly assumes a V2.0.
Two hundred LEDs on a fishing pole, and a night dark enough to draw on.