day 91 - your mission, should you choose to accept it

Earth Hour 2012.

Five little kids braved the darkness and explored the darkest depths of the great outdoors.

Their mission, should they choose to accept it: find the glow in the dark Easter eggs and bring them back to the house.












The glow in the dark Easter eggs were made by putting small glow sticks inside plastic Easter eggs. The glow in the dark sidewalk chalk is from a kit by Crayola. It takes longer than the package says for it to harden, so to speed it up (and make it far more vibrant) I baked it in the oven at 400 F for ten minutes and then threw it in the fridge for a few minutes. It worked like a charm.

What did you do for Earth Hour?

day 85 - earth hour

I give up on nap time. I am tired of fighting with the boys so I give up. Bedtimes will just have to get earlier.

Today rather than nap, we went to the curling club to see Daddy curl. We promptly left because the boys kept pummeling each other, Owen kept demanding to know where the nets were and Ethan kept dropping an eight letter swear word (or is it two four letter swear words) that he picked up from his mother. While watching the game, Ethan blurted out "That's ---- ----!" in disgust. Right around the time people started asking "Did he just say what I thought he said?" we were out of there.

Crap. But in my defense I did just lose my job.

So we left the curling club with the promise that they could each pick one item from the dollar store if they were good. They could have whatever they wanted and we could pick up some supplies for earth hour.

By the time we got there, the boys were asleep so we sat around in the van for a bit and waited for them to wake up.

XL steeped tea + sleeping twin boys + an 80s classic + stolen wifi = HEAVEN



I immediately regretted the whole "you can get any item you want" discussion when they each picked out a 15" water gun.



In the evening we marked earth hour with Nana & Grandad. Last year we went with flashlights. This year we went with glow sticks and laser beams that attach to your fingers with elastics. The glow sticks were a BIG disappointment. The lights weren't bright enough and they didn't work well at all. The finger laser beams were perfect. The candle in the background worked out well too. It's the little star burst you can see in the pictures.







Shortly before the one hour mark the troops started to tire a bit (this is Owen).



What a nice way to spend a Saturday night. We tripped over each other in the dark, the dog crept away and got into the garbage and at one point Ava kneed me in the eye but it was worth it. In fact I don't know why we don't do this more often.

(For those of you following my Project 365, I have a couple of days from last week I haven't posted. I didn't miss those days, I just haven't gotten around to posting them. They'll be up tomorrow.)

day 193 - bedtime $

Another uneventful day. Here's Ava lying on her bed playing a sundae making game on my iPod before she went to sleep. I'm so happy this turned out. Thumbs up for spot metering and makeshift tripods (stuffed animals).



Here is her masterpiece:

painting with light $

I've had a few questions as to how I did my earth hour photos on Saturday so I thought I would share my setup and some tips. I'm more than happy to share.

The technique is called "painting with light" and it involves using a tripod (or hard surface), long exposures and a light source like a flashlight, sparkler or glow stick. I couldn't find my tripod mount so I set the camera on my tv stand instead. I had my daughter stand in the middle of the room in the dark with the flashlight. Focusing was hard because I couldn't get behind my camera to see through the viewfinder and other than a little bit of light coming from candles placed in other parts of the room, the room was pitch black. (It was Earth Hour, so I couldn't cheat and turn on the light to lock the focus.) Anyway, without further ado, here's how you do it:

1. Get your light source ready whether it's a flashlight, sparkler, glow stick, etc.

2. Set up your tripod or put your camera on a hard, steady surface.

3. If you are the shooter and the subject or are involved in the light painting, use your camera timer.

4. Flip your camera to shutter priority mode (Tv mode on Canon cameras) and set it to a long exposure. 5 seconds is perfect for something like this (done with a flashlight):

10 seconds works for something like this (also done with a flashlight):

or this (done with a sparkler):

and 10-15 seconds works great for this (Please note this is two images put together in Photoshop. I did 'earth' in one shot and 'hour' in another. Both words were made with a flashlight):

5. Lock your focus on your subject. Click the shutter and either get your subject to start "painting" with their light source or run like hell to get into position while the timer flashes. I found the timer mode easiest and suspect it works even better with a subject as they know the second that light on the timer holds steady they need to get ready.

6. Start painting your design, keeping the following thing in mind - the camera is going to capture light everywhere it sees it and the longer you hold the light source in one spot, the brighter that spot gets and it creates a burn spot. If you are going to be painting something and want to avoid tails on your art, cover it with your hand to kill the light (obviously this doesn't work for sparklers), or hold it in one spot. If you find it burns too much, you can try again with a shorter exposure once you get a feel for how long it takes you to create your design. Also remember that if you are using a flashlight, the lines are wider where there is more light. In the case of the heart above, the thicker lines mean more light was hitting the camera. The thinner lines are where the flashlight is pointed on an angle away from the camera.

7. Have fun and experiment. In most cases we jumped out of the way so we wouldn't be caught in the shot, but there are a million other different ways you can do it. You could shine the flashlight on your face so you appear in the shot. You could set your on camera flash to rear curtain which means that the flash fires at the end of the exposure (instead of the beginning which is the way it usually works) and illuminate your subject using the flash and get something like this:

(I did this last summer and it was so much fun. Details here and here.)

This shot has some ambient light in the mix. The other shots used a small aperture of f22 but this one was shot with the same shutter speeds as the others, but the aperture was wide open at f2.8, letting candle light from the dining room into the picture.

The timing of this post is perfect because it coincides with the new Photojojo newsletter that just came out today. Check out their very cool idea for painting with light. I hope this is helpful! Please don't hesitate to leave me a comment if you have any questions!