Projected

I have, for many years, wanted to play with a photographic technique called ‘Projector Photography’. This is essentially where a light source (in may case a digital projector) is used to throw patterns or other images upon a subject and the results captured in the camera as a photograph. I know it’s all been done before and this technique has been around since the very beginning of photography but I’m thinking the important thing here is that it hasn’t been done by me yet 😉 and to further this minor notion of inflated self-importance I recently obtained a digital projector (a little XGA Epson) and began to make some experiments … the first of which I’m happy to present here.

For the technically minded: For the pattern I created a vertical line image in Photoshop using the pattern editor and transferred it to my laptop connected to the projector. I was running the image through Lightroom in fullscreen mode. This enabled me to play with the image size (and hence the width of the stripes) and also apply a hard vignette to make the projected images smaller and circular. The images was captured using a Nikon D600 with an 85mm f/1.4 @ f8 and ISO 640. At these settings the exposure time was around 1/6sec and so I had to remain quite still … excepting the frame where I took advantage of the slow shutter and deliberately moved my head from side to side. These setting also showed that I have plenty of light to play with using increased ISO settings on the camera.

All in all a successful first experiment I thought … can’t wait to put my favourite model in front of it 🙂

I have many ideas for patterns or images to project … spiderwebs, water, fire … I’d interested in any ideas you may have for the technique.