Rainbow Swirl

Ok so you know how I constantly talk about using Weekly Fifty as a tool to help me learn, grow, and improve as a photographer? Well this shot is a clear example of the kind of the progression that I am always looking for, and it happened directly after I took the photo last week. In that sense, this could be thought of almost as a Part Deux to the stylized monochromatic image of a five-spoked wheel of light that I shared seven days ago. It’s like the original, but different in some key ways that demonstrate a clear sense of personal growth. It also cannot simply stand on its own, as I would have never taken this brilliantly-colored image without first shooting its black-and-white counterpart.

Basically, here’s what happened. After taking the photo of five white lights arrayed in a star pattern above a clear glass ball, editing it just a bit in Lightroom, and uploading it to Flickr, I immediately thought about ways to improve upon it. My first, and perhaps most obvious, thought was to use color. Just imagine a similar composition but full of brilliant greens, blues, reds, and more! And so I did. I put my memory card back in my camera, went back to the same setting I had just created with the lights above the glass ball sitting on a whiteboard, and got to work. I changed the color of each of the lights to random HSL values, like reaching into a bag of skittles and just going with whatever came out. The result was fine, and I took a few shots from straight-down like I had done with the previous image, but something was…missing. It was too derivative, and I realized that just changing the colors wasn’t enough.

I then set each of the five lights to specific colors of the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. I also changed my physical position to more of a three-quarters view instead of straight down, and spent a few minutes just sort of roving about while photographing the illuminated glass ball from a variety of angles. I quickly realized that doing so gave me exactly what I didn’t even know was missing, and helped not only elevate the image but transform it into an entirely new creative composition. Instead of looking straight down at five colored bars of light, I was now looking at a multi-hued star suspended in midair surrounded by brilliant streaks of luminescence, almost as if someone had taken an electromagnetic paintbrush and spread streaks of color around the ball from all across the visible spectrum. What really sold me on this image was the green in the top-left, which almost gives a sense of kinetic energy and motion as if the ball were simultaneously rolling while remaining perfectly still.

This shot looks almost artificial, like something an AI program would generate, but I promise you it’s all real and captured completely in-camera. It was gloriously fun and rewarding to take, and made me practically giddy at the thought of what might come next.

Thanks Phil and Tom :)