Mystery Monday 16 Answer + Tree Spin Art

I don’t have a new image to post today, but thought I would at least post the answer to the last Mystery Monday challenge.

Here was the picture:

and it got these guesses:

christmas lights
part of a wreath
an ornament
ball of red twine/ribbon

The answer is:

A tree with christmas lights strung up from top to bottom in straight lines.

I stood inside the canopy of lights, and spun in a circle while taking the picture!

Here is the same effect on a tree during the day:

The key is, you need to have a long shutter speed so that your shutter will stay open while you spin.  If you are doing this at night, you wont have a problem.  Just make sure you keep the flash off.  If you are doing it during the day, then some tricks for making your shutter speed longer are to:

1) set your ISO to the lowest setting possible

2) set your aperture to the largest number possible (i.e. smallest aperture)

3) Use an ND filter on your camera….although if you have one of those,  you probably don’t need my tips!

Anyways, then you just point your camera up, and start spinning, then release the shutter while you are spinning.

Try your best not to shake the camera in the other direction, otherwise you will end up with this:

You can also experiment with making the focal point of the picture off center.  And depending on your exposure, you can get an overall darker or lighter picture.  Looks very different!

You can also move in different directions.  In the following picture, I basically fanned my camera top to bottom in one big sweep while pressing the shutter release:

This is another fun movement picture.  It is of the leaves on the ground.  In the first picture you can see the leaves etc on the ground and how they essentially leave a color trail behind them.

Well if you leave the shutter open long enough, you can completely blur our the leaves and just make a cool design.  This could be a fun background to use for something else…or it might just live on your hard drive forever as mine often do…

And then you can have some fun with the picture in Lightroom/Photoshop/iPhoto (you get the point) to get some different effects and bring some of the colors out!

Well that’s it for the day.

Hope you have some fun experimenting!

oh and by the way – pretty much all of this can be done with a point and shoot too.  Just turn off your flash, and if you can, decrease your ISO.  If you can’t, then try putting the camera on landscape mode and see if that works (the camera will automatically use a very small aperture).

Have a good day!