Exposure 008

Click Mint pass project

Is it possible to do light-painting using this instant camera? That’s the challenge for today!

An instant camera… with a slow shutter speed limited to one quarter of a second. Not a chance I can do this that fast. All of my long-exposure images are between 1 and 13 seconds. 

My usual workflow is pretty simple: I paint with light behind a dancer while my camera captures the motion of the light. The only source of light is the one in my hand. This means I have to light up my model while I create a visually appealing trace that blends well with the surroundings. But for this project, I’ll have to do it all within a quarter of a second. I tried a bunch of things like moving fast, but nothing was working. The problem is that there’s a long delay between the moment we press the button and the moment the picture is taken. And the settings are all automatic. This means I would reach that one fourth of a second IF I’m lucky. I had to find a way to have my light in continuous fast motion. I made a small tube which I attached to a shoelace. And right away, I was much closer to getting something decent. I took over 200 pictures total just to have this single one. Of course, the end result is quite noisy as I’m pushing the camera to its limits, but at f2, iso1600 and 0.25 seconds, I finally got something I’m happy with. Here’s our final image. Exposure #008

About the light-painting tool

At first, I used a small sugar tube from my online store, but as this one was unidirectional, I made a custom one using small pieces of holographic stickers. I wanted the light to emit in all directions. I then used a flashlight and I attached the whole thing with a shoelace

About Click Mint Pass

Click Mint Pass is a project by art collector Norcal Guy. The concept is revolving around this little instant camera. Each entry becomes one numbered “Exposure”. To participate, we needed to win the auction of the piece created by the previous photographer. I won the 7th one, which was created by FVCKRENDER. Thus, I’m making Exposure 008, dropping today on Foundation.

The short interview about the project is from “The Future of Art” by Roger Dickerman. Check out the full episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Xs0Dvgu13MmfzHI15gzVL (yes, they do talk about the biscuits!)

About the camera

The chosen camera for this project is a Fujifilm Instax mini Evo™. Norcal Guy chose this one before coming up with the art project. He bought it for his daughter as it was a way to have an instant camera that can print, without having to print all of the images (this is a digital camera with an integrated printer).

Final thoughts

No one asked us to do light-painting with this camera. I didn’t even know if that was possible before I decided to participate in this project. But the idea of getting this new challenge was quite exciting and it’s been a total pleasure to work on this with the team. Thank you so much Norcal Guy for coming up with this art project. I can’t wait to see where the camera is going to travel next.

Created in August 2023 at the Xangle Studio. With Kim Henry, Christian Dion, Guillermo Castellanos and Andrés de la Rosa.