Blacklight Experiment

I was hanging out over at Eric X's place with Matt from PoisonApplez the other night and Eric starts showing me a bunch of masks that he has painted with glow in the dark colors. I thought it would be cool to try to photograph them in black light to capture the glowing details.

At first I thought to shoot in a black room but I noticed that the white seamless paper in the studio was glowing and I thought I would try shooting on that so that the shape of the models would stand out as well. Our friend John happened to be at the studio with his spankin' new Canon 5D Mark II so I asked if I could borrow it. He graciously agreed.

I used three blacklight tubes clamped to lightstands, two on the right and one on the left. There is a second light on the left aimed more or less on the background. I wound up shooting at f2.8 at ISO 4000 with a shutter of 1/130 so I locked the camera down on the cinestand. The images are pretty noisy but I have to say I am pretty impressed. Images taken with my Canon 40D would have looked like a Seraut painting.