Making "Neon"

As you saw, the boys did a pretty good job of spelling out 2013 in flashlight script. But that still left the question of how to see their faces without them being blurry. I finally decided that if I put the boys in a completely dark room and manually operated a hand-held external flash at some point during the exposure that I would probably be able to freeze them and still see the light painting. It took quite some time to come up with the appropriate settings for both the camera and the flash (eventually I used a 10 second exposure and a 1/32 second flash), but once I saw the results I knew it would work.

During the experimentation the boys started goofing around and Carol also got into the act. We decided it might be fun to try to paint antlers or antennas onto heads and you can see some of the results below. In all of these cases, something went wrong but you can see the promise.