Living Open Source

This year I got the Rock Solid group to create the graphics for the carol service. Take a handful of teenagers, a few torches and a camera with a 6 second exposure and wow!…

Click on an image to enlarge.

You can also browse and download other sizes of these images on my flickr page.

How to create images like this:

1. Assemble several crazy teenagers willing to work together. This exercise does require teemwork to produce the more complex images.
2. Equip them with a selection of light sources. If you can find some with different colours, that can be useful. The blues in our images come from a lightsaber!
3. Set up a camera on a tripod, as it is important the camera doesn’t move. You need a camera with manual settings control to set an exposure time of about 6 seconds.
4. Turn out most of your lights. It doesn’t need to be completely dark, and in fact it helps to be able to see your camera settings. Images can be manipulated later on your PC to darken background.
5. Get your artists to imagine they are painting with their torches on a large canvas in front of them but in reverse. Start with easy stuff, like writing their name individually, then move on to making images together. Getting one to stand still, while others give them wings or horns can be a fun way to begin. Then we worked through the nativity story and they came up with the ideas.
6. Three, two, one, go…Press the shutter and encourage your artists to fill the canvas and the six seconds with their artwork. Turn torches off when finished, otherwise you get blobs of light!
8. We also had the camera set up plugged into a TV to give the artists some instant feedback on their work. Each image takes several attempts before you get the right picture. Seeign it on a larger screen helps to work out where you are going wrong if your angels look more like clouds.
9. Then use Picassa (or similar) on your PC to make background disappear (we used the shadow slider) and then crop.