Gadgetory

cleaning your house can be pretty boring basically because it eats into your photography time so I'm going to show you a way to combine both cleaning and photography we're going to be doing light paintings with robot vacuum cleaners so for this you'll need obviously a robot vacuum cleaner we're using a samsung navi bot because it's got some LED lights on the top but any other robot vacuum cleaner you have access to should be fine a DSLR and a wide-angle lens for this tutorial I'm using a 24 millimeter lens but you can also use the kit 18 to 55 millimeter lens that came with your DSLR just use it around the 18 to 35 millimeter mark you'll also need a remote shutter release this is because you'll be shooting in bulb mode and you're going to need to release the shutter remotely finally you'll need a tripod or something sturdy to keep a camera on while it's taking photos over the course of a couple of minutes next step is to set up your DSLR put it on the tripod and find bulb mode on some cameras this is found in your manual exposure mode keep flicking the shutter speed dial until you find a B on other cameras there is a specific mode on the dial that is denoted by B find this and turn it on then you'll set your aperture you probably want to set something between f/8 to f/11 to get started with you want to reasonably narrow so you're not letting in too much extra light just getting the light from the robot vacuum cleaner then your shutter speed is obviously determined by your shutter release now for this particular how-to you're going to be using a shutter release where you can lock the shutter button down using the remote now it's time to turn off the lights and start taking photos there's no particular best time to leave your shutter try and experiment around 2 to 3 minutes to get started with and take a look and see what kind of light trails your cleaner is leaving if you're finding that you're not seeing enough of the light trails you might want to open up your aperture so move it down to something like f5 points or even lower if your lens will let you now we've played around with some of the effects that are given from using the built in LED lights on the robot vacuum cleaner we can get a bit more creative think about buying a battery powered LED now this is a little bit stronger and you can attach it to the top of your robot vacuum cleaner and let it go and finally if you want to get super creative and you've got access to two or more robot vacuum cleaners think about putting them both on the floor at the same time letting them go and you can even do some cool experiments like putting colored cellophane on top of the lights to give different colored light effects so this has been how to do light painting effects with a robot vacuum cleaner hopefully you've had fun it's made you think a bit more about the tools you can use for light painting I'm Lexi civilities for seen it make sure to check out the full text of this tutorial over at the website