Experiments with Screensavers & Long Exposures
The electric effect is one of the most striking (pardon the pun). 105mm 8s F18 ISO 64.
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.
Certain effects may have looked great in real time but turn into little more than blurred blobs when you use a long exposure. Though perhaps this almost solid colour image could still be used as a background. 105mm 8s F16 ISO 64.
Another example of a blurry abstract result, though the leading line of the yellow sand the main area of interest. 105mm 8s F18 ISO 64
Having a screensaver with a central point of focus that doesn’t move or moves very little works well. The clouds around the moon have blurred with movement to create a swirling motion. 105mm 8s F18 ISO 64.
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.
Physics effects like smoke can produce some of the best and most interesting results and are also the easiest to combine with other images as you will see below. 105mm 8s F18 ISO 64.
Vortex effects work well as again you have a central point of focus with parts moving around it. 105mm 8s F18 ISO 64.
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.
Centred around an offset star shape has produced powerful colour swirls in a very trippy look. 105mm 8s F18 ISO 64.
Another good example of having a non-moving central focus with swirling movement below. 105mm 8s F18 ISO 64.
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>
On it’s own a long exposure has created motion blur in the stars. 105mm 8s F18 ISO 64.
However by combining it with a transition to a different image you can create a different layered look with sometimes unpredictable results. 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.
Here I have a cyberpunk setting with little movement. 105mm 8s F18 ISO 64.
But by combining it with the smoke effect I showed previously we can create something with a lot more visual interest, and perhaps, in this case, a bit of mystery. 105mm 8s F18 ISO 64.
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