Things in Pairs
The photograph above is a 54 second single, long exposure and the cover art for my wife, Audrey Wright’s, upcoming debut album, Things in Pairs, which she recorded with her colleague, pianist Yundu Wang, earlier this year. As with all my photographs, the visual effects seen are not digitally generated ( aka “photoshopped” ). Rather, they are the result of the carefully orchestrated presentation of light via custom built devices and systems. The systems behind this photograph took five months to plan, build, and program and leveraged a device I built in early 2020, The Halo Machine.
In the behind the scenes video above, you’ll notice that the subjects were hit with light three times over the course of the 54 second long exposure. Each of these three passings or “stamps” used a different combination of lights. Here, each stamp illuminated different areas of the subjects with different levels of intensity. This allowed the resulting image (the aggregate of all three stamps) to appear evenly exposed. Without this control, the overlapping areas of all three stamps would appear overexposed. To control which lights turned on / off and when with each stamp, I created a system of “spin triggers” that communicated with an Arduino microcontroller ( Please see diagram above ). In this system, the spin triggers relayed real-time positional information about the Halo Machine’s arm to the microcontroller which subsequently turned different lights on / off based on a loaded program. In between each stamp the microcontroller was loaded with a different program that dictated which lights were to be turned on / off for a given Halo Machine position. Below is an overview of which lights were turned on for each stamp.
Microcontroller loaded with Program 1
Subjects in position 1
Lights on during pass:
Bell Lights 3, 4, & 5
Face Light
Star Lights
Microcontroller loaded with Program 2
Subjects in position 2
Lights on during pass:
Bell Lights 1 & 2
Face Light
Star Lights
Violin Light
Ankle Lights
Microcontroller loaded with Program 3
Subjects in position 3
Lights on during pass:
Face Light
Star Lights
