GEOMETRIC LIGHT TRAILS

I am writing a new issue of Petersen's Photographic Magazine, and it will be about all the cool projects you can do at home. I re-visited a technique I did years ago this afternoon for the magazine project, and I had a lot of fun shooting abstract trails of light. To create the image you see here, I hung a small penlight from a horizontal wooden dowl on a wire and, with the camera pointing up at it in a dark room, I opened the shutter for 25 seconds. I used 200 ISO and f/11 for the exposure, and during the length of time the shutter was open, I placed colored gels over the lens. They weren't of optical quality, but in this case it didn't matter.