One rainy Saturday evening when my kids were young I was trying to come up with a creative activity to coax them away from their electronic devices for a while. Earlier that week I had read about several photographers who had been experimenting with creating images from light patterns that were reminiscent of the drawings made by the classic Spirograph geometric drawing device that many of us had as kids. Their technique involved attaching a small penlight to a string, taping it to the ceiling, giving it a swing, and taking time exposures as the pendulum-like movements of the penlight created light trails.
The kids bought in to the idea and we enthusiastically got to work. The initial attempts weren’t very successful as the light from the flashlight was not precise enough, so we wrapped the end of the penlight with some electrical tape to reduce the size of the light to a tiny speck. This made for much crisper looking images.
Next we experimented with a variety of different exposure times and found most of the best images required between 30-45 seconds to complete an interesting pattern. We also varied the path of the swing, sometimes using a very circular one and other times using a more elliptical one. The original shots were relatively straightforward single exposures and we left the white color of the spirograph images unaltered.
Once we produced several shots we liked, we added a bit of complexity by creating multiple exposures. This was done by covering the camera lens after we thought we might have a good initial pattern, giving the penlight a swing in an alternate direction, then uncovering the lens, allowing the exposure to continue.
We then used colorful plastic films to create more vibrant images using the same multiple exposure technique as before, adding a different colored one each time we would start a new exposure.
Finally we experimented with multiple colors, patterns, and exposures, but ultimately found the best results came from using no more than three of each. Any more than that caused the images to become too busy.
All in all, over the course of a few weeks we came up with some interesting spirographs which were later incorporated into a couple of coffee table books I published as keepsakes for each of the kids.
You can view more of these images in my Spirographs gallery.
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