Experiments with Screensavers & Long Exposures
I’ll be honest, this week’s blog was originally going to be all about Highgate Cemetery, London’s most famous graveyard. However, the words just wouldn’t come out and so by kicking it back a week I decided to have a play around with a creative concept I’d dabbled in a little bit before. A while ago one of the top images at the abstract competition of my local camera club was of a long exposure of a screensaver. Remember those? With vast improvements in screen technology these are now little more than nostalgic novelties, but the interesting moving patterns they create do indeed make for great little photographic experiments.
With a bit of time free I decided to revisit this idea to see what I could come up with and think about if there was any practical use for the results. Setup was straight forward, I had my camera on a tripod with my 105mm macro lens (so I didn’t have to worry about minimum focus distances & the distortion of wide-angle lenses), pointed at a large monitor. By adjusting my settings around an 8s exposure I could get the desired result and handily I could of course reduce or increase the brightness of my screen to help attain the correct exposure.
After a while I started to work out which screensavers worked better than others, some patterns looked great in real time but when put through a long exposure turned out into a blurred mess. The ones I found worked the best were ones with a fixed point of reference, where you had a solid shape or pattern surrounded by movement. What was useful for some of them where transitions to a completely different effect or image and, by timing your exposure correctly, you could photograph across this transition to create a layered effect and something completely new. I then took this a step further by combining different screensavers, one with a solid effect and one with a physics effect by simply switching between tabs halfway through the exposure.
So how useful is all this apart from being a bit of fun? Well, by combining different screensavers and effects this could be a good way to create interesting backgrounds for you to play around in in Photoshop (though unless you make the effects yourself it wouldn’t be appropriate for any commercial work). Another could be to simply practice with physics effects like smoke. A lot of them are very realistic and would give you an opportunity to try different shutter speeds with the same section over and over again until you understood what all the possibilities were. Then if you ever did use smoke on a real shoot, you already have some experience on how it might behave when deployed. <White cliffs transition 105mm 8s F18 ISO 64>
All-in-all though it’s just a bit of creative fun, taking something simple that everyone with an internet connection has access to and playing around until you create something funky looking. Have you tried this or something similar before? Do you have any other ideas on how this could be used? Let me know in the comments section down below.
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