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Step 11Photographing lasers
Overview:
Laser Ball? Check. Point-n-shoot camera? Check. So now what? How do you capture the laser-awesomeness? There are basically two ways I know to photograph laser beams: 1) Use a fog machine or 2) Use a long-exposure setting on your camera and a piece of white paper/card. I think most people have seen long-exposure light painting, which can work just the same with lasers. But the difference with lasers is the question: how do you capture the razor-thin beam of light and not just the flare from the source?
Fog machines are fun...:
You don't need an expensive fog machine to capture a laser beam with a short exposure. The fog machine I used came from grocery store of all places... in the Halloween isle! The fog will create microscopic particles that cause the laser beam to scatter in all directions, some of which find their way into your camera. With fog you can keep the exposure short which is great for capturing video but you'll want to dim the lights in order to pull the beam out of the ambient light background.
Long exposure with a piece of paper:
The idea here is to position a scattering/reflecting surface (a simple piece of white paper works great) in front of the beam and uniformly move it down the length of the beam during a long exposure shot. If we think about it in a discrete-sense, we are imaging little slices of the beam as the card reflects the laser spot. By moving the reflector and keeping the laser beam in a fixed position we assure that the reflector will be blurred (almost ghost-like) and the laser beam will dominate the scene.
Camera settings:
It's pretty simple: turn up the exposure to several seconds (this is often labeled as -2 to +2 in terms of f-stops on point-n-shoots) and lower the ISO setting to avoid grainy images. Normally you'd turn up the ISO setting in a dark environment to capture more light but this will create unwanted graininess in the dark regions of your images.
Laser Ball? Check. Point-n-shoot camera? Check. So now what? How do you capture the laser-awesomeness? There are basically two ways I know to photograph laser beams: 1) Use a fog machine or 2) Use a long-exposure setting on your camera and a piece of white paper/card. I think most people have seen long-exposure light painting, which can work just the same with lasers. But the difference with lasers is the question: how do you capture the razor-thin beam of light and not just the flare from the source?
Fog machines are fun...:
You don't need an expensive fog machine to capture a laser beam with a short exposure. The fog machine I used came from grocery store of all places... in the Halloween isle! The fog will create microscopic particles that cause the laser beam to scatter in all directions, some of which find their way into your camera. With fog you can keep the exposure short which is great for capturing video but you'll want to dim the lights in order to pull the beam out of the ambient light background.
Long exposure with a piece of paper:
The idea here is to position a scattering/reflecting surface (a simple piece of white paper works great) in front of the beam and uniformly move it down the length of the beam during a long exposure shot. If we think about it in a discrete-sense, we are imaging little slices of the beam as the card reflects the laser spot. By moving the reflector and keeping the laser beam in a fixed position we assure that the reflector will be blurred (almost ghost-like) and the laser beam will dominate the scene.
Camera settings:
It's pretty simple: turn up the exposure to several seconds (this is often labeled as -2 to +2 in terms of f-stops on point-n-shoots) and lower the ISO setting to avoid grainy images. Normally you'd turn up the ISO setting in a dark environment to capture more light but this will create unwanted graininess in the dark regions of your images.
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