Inspired by my experiments a few months ago on Abersoch beach in North Wales, Mark asked for a demonstration of the technique to produce these light balls or balls of light. He was off to New Zealand for a holiday (extremely jealous) and wanted to try this type of thing out there. The above experiment was taken with the 10mm super wide angle lens in his back garden one evening.

Walking back to the car after an afternoon exploring Robin Hood’s Bay and the beach I decided it was a scene that was worthy of an experiment with a new toy my friend John had given me. I had seen many pictures taken in the day with very blurry clouds like this and wondered how it was done. Turns out it is using a “big stopper” filter in front of the lens, that is a ten stop neutral density filter. Basically very dark sunglasses for your camera that cause the shutter speed to be very long (hence the cloud blur). However these filters are over £100 so I found a cheap “solution”. My friend John is a welder and welders wear helmets with dark glass to protect their eyes. John kindly gave me a small square of this glass to experiment with. It made my 1/250th of a second shutter speed into 30 seconds and is the equivalent of a 13 stop neutral density filter. That’s the good news. The bad news is it comes out of the camera looking green (see below), but with RAW image capture and some skills with Lightroom and Photoshop I was able to recover the above photograph. I must try this again in future!

I want to do more of these ball of light experiments with my new sets of LED Christmas lights. Particularly around water, as the reflections are almost as interesting as the subjects themselves. I had some assistance here so that I didn’t need to combine the two globes in photoshop, in fact there is no photoshop work in any of these LED light experiments.

In my last photograph titled Weird light at beach huts I lied. That’s right, I made that strange blue light just as I made the big ball of light in the above photograph. This was taken on Abersoch beach. I set the camera up in the pitch dark and climbed up into the beach hut with a small set of LED Christmas lights. Moving around in a circle whilst swinging them around my head I created the above abstract image. The orange glow on the steps was so I could see where I was going (light from my torch) and so that the camera could focus on something.