Can We Get There By Laser Light?

Tom Benedict

How many miles to the optics lab?
Three score and ten.
Can we get there by laser light?
Yes, and back again.

My third photograph for Iron Photographer 212 is somewhat less sinister than the first two. The elements for Iron Photographer 212 are:

1 - a thing in the palm of your hand
2 - your hand resting on a flat surface
3 - holga-fied

For this I wanted to have something less tangible in my hand than a pill bottle or a boot: light.

I toyed around with the idea of having light projecting out of the center of my hand, but decided having the light interact with rather than originate from my palm would be better. Hence the prism.

This was done as a single bulb exposure photograph. With all of the lights off in the room I opened the shutter, painted out the laser beam with a white business card, then hit the button on the transmitter for the strobe that was positioned 45 degrees up and camera right with a 42" shoot-through umbrella.

Of course this leaves out how much time was spent jockeying my hand back and forth and holding the prism just so so all the beams went where they were supposed to. After one frustrated attempt I set everything up as a tethered shoot and tripped the shutter with my computer mouse. Despite that it still took a LOT of frames before I got this to work. But making them was a heckuvalot of fun.


View Project:

Utata » Tribal Photography » Projects