Saturday Night in Mulhuddart

Jelly beans at night

The deadline for the paper I'm working on got extended. Back into procrastination mode until the deadline re-approaches. I'm in tapper for the Ironman, so training load this weekend is low: 3.5 hour bike on Saturday and an hour run today.
I'm not much of a disco dancer, so going out on Saturday night is not all that appealing to me. But I do like photography. I had read an article that describes Painting with Light and decided to try it. You need a camera where you can select shutter speed, a tripod, and a flashlight. Turn off all the lights, open the camera shutter, and use the flashlight to "paint" over your subject.
It took me a bunch of attempts to figure out which subjects would work, how to focus in the dark, and what shutter speed/aperture size combination works best.

I like my coffee

I took these pictures over the course of three evenings (I wasn't just avoiding the Saturday night crowd ;-) It doesn't really get dark here until well after ten at night and last night, with nothing better to do, I started early. It was really not dark enough yet to achieve th effect described in the article above, but the technique produced some interesting pictures nontheless:

Low rider choo-choo

I lit up the bottom of the train with an LED light through the glass table it was sitting on. Then I used the incandescent flashlight to add some light from the side. When I clean glass, it never really works. There are always streaks. Last night I got reminded that getting rid of dust seems to be an equally difficult problem for me. Click on the image above to enlarge it and you'll see what I mean.
I also played around with a green laser pointer, but even a couple of seconds with that thing produces too many photons for most of these pictures. Although I like the swirly candy-striped pattern in this one:

Using a laser pointer and a flashlight

I found out that light-colored jelly beans, when briefly illuminated with a laser, give off an incredible glow.

You can view the entire collection, free of charge, on my Picasa page.