A few of the POTN crowd were out late on Saturday night in the More London area (City Hall and the immediate vicinity).  The plan was to stay up all night and get some eerie shots of an empty London when the sun started to rise at around 4am.  From a group of 6 of us, only one managed to stay up and get those sorts of shots.  I wasn’t that one.

Far too cold for this fair weather Canadian so I was back in my warm flat with a hot tea by 3am.  Respectable for an old man like myself, but not good enough to reach the initial goal.

I did however, manage to get in a bit of light painting before throwing in the towel.

As always, there are more light painting and light orb photos in the gallery.

We went back to Canary Wharf again this weekend after our slightly failed attempt a couple of weeks ago.  This time we jumped through the proper hoops and got a permit to be there, so the security guards (who were all very friendly) weren’t able to send us packing.

Ian wasn’t able to make it this week due to a football related knee injury, so I was joined by none other than Lee Crawley from Crawley (the gent who created my new toaster icon).  He’s done some cool light painting in the past, but I believe this was his first orb outing.

We even tried to combine our 2 light painting styles as seen in the above image (the light ribbon to the left), and even more so in this shot.

Still kicking myself for not creating a proper orb in this shot, but I could only manage a 1 minute exposure so had to do all of that in the time available.

This is the first time I’m posting watermarked images, which I know can be a bit annoying.  They are however at almost twice the resolution I used to post images at, so there’s good news with the bad.

The rest are in the gallery here!

ps:  thanks again to Ian for sorting out the permit for us, and to Lee for being my trigger man and making sure my compositions were ok while I spun the orbs.

Well, sort of.  The plan was to head into Canary Wharf and take a few shots in some predetermined locations with my new orb tools.  That plan was quickly kyboshed by the (friendly) security guards in Canary Wharf.  They quickly detailed the area in which we weren’t allowed to shoot which, by chance or by karmic bad luck, happened to cover every spot I was hoping to visit.

They were nice enough to explain how to go about getting permission to shoot there however.  After my impending company has left and Danni and I have returned from our trip to Greece I plan on doing just that and going back to get the shots I wanted.

Here is the one and only shot we (Ian Schofield and I) managed to get before being moved along.

The rest were taken (in almost child like defiance) from across the water but facing back into the area we weren’t allowed to photograph.

We were actually approached by another security guard in this last location, but he didn’t seem to mind what we were doing.  He was just curious I think.

I have learned that it’s very hard to find a good location in London that’s dark enough to get these orbs to turn out well.  Everywhere is so brightly lit that the light pollution makes everything fade away into the background.  I believe it simply calls for brighter orbs!

Few more in the gallery here.

After several screw-ups I managed to create a working orb tool in no small part thanks to the tutorial here.  I made one modification to that design in that I added in the ability to swap out different coloured lights from the base unit.  I’ll post some photos and a bit of a run down/tutorial on exactly what I did later this week.

Anyways, I hopped on the bus out to St. Paul’s on Saturday night and slowly wandered back home taking photos along the way.  My mate Sylvester turned up part way through and helped out with a couple of shots which I couldn’t have done without said assistance, so cheers mate!

As usual, there are a few more in the gallery.

In yet another effort to keep myself busy, I’ve ordered some EL Wire from The Glow Company.  I thought it might be fun to play with in a long exposure shot.

The effects you can get are neat, but I’m not sure of the practical applications yet.  Will need to play around more I suspect.