Remember this video from a week or so ago? It was made by the people at London’s BERG studio for people at advertising agency Dentsu, as part of a wider project called “Making Future Magic”.
BERG hit on the idea of breaking words and pictures into slices which are displayed on an iPad screen one at a time. If you capture this display with a long exposure on your camera, you get 3D words and images extruded into thin air.
And now the rest of us can join in the fun, with a $1 app for iPhone and iPad, called Holo-Paint.
The app is pretty simple to use. Enter some text, and fiddle with the settings beneath for colour, thickness, depth, font and so on.
Then tap once to start the display, and make sure you hit your camera’s shutter button too.
For best results use long exposures in very dark rooms, and get someone to help out: my initial experiments were fiddly because I was trying to operate both an iPhone and a Nikon D40 simultaneously. You get better results if the person dragging the iPhone or iPad is able to keep a steady pace. It’s worth doing some practice runs first.
Keeping playing around with exposure times and app settings until you capture something magical of your own. Happy light painting!
Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He also writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. You can find out more at his website, and follow him on Twitter @gilest.
