The theme for this week sounded very simple and I thought it would be a snap to capture the perfect image. As it turns out, nothing in this world of ours is as simple as we perceive it to be initially.

My first thought was to capture a spinning coin. Seemed so simple at the time. Alas it turned out to be a pretty challenging, no correction, superbly incredibly, unrealistically difficult. So I had to abandon that thought process and look for inspiration elsewhere.

Then it struck me like a lightbulb! Lights! Spinning light trail images are something I have seen in loads of photography blogs. Using a moving light source anchored to an axis of sorts and long exposure, photographers have created some spectacular shots. So I thought why not try my hand at it?

I dug up the fairy lights (they usually only see light of day at Diwali time) and began setting up the rig. My camera was mounted on a gorilla pod (well a reliable and cheap knock off anyway!) and placed at a suitable height in the room. Shutting off all other sources of light to ensure that the twinkling fairy lights are the only luminous object in the room I began experimenting with different settings. Finally settling on a 30 second exposure I began taking the shots whilst spinning the fairy lights ( the tail end of it).

The process was a tad cumbersome since I didn’t have a remote trigger I ended up hitting the shutter release, running to the other end of the room to pick up the twinkling fairy lights and begin spinning it around. The delay between me hitting the shutter release and beginning the spinning action also caused some unwanted light trails being picked up in the shot.

So I decided to ask my lovely wife (and muse for some of the photography shots) to help out. She took care of the shutter release while I stood in position to spin around the fairy light thus avoiding the unwanted light trails.

The shots I got with this set up were the ones that I began liking and ended up on the Lightroom edit table. The image that made the final cut was cropped and edited to bring out the colours in the image

But I still felt something was missing in the final image. So I decided to open the image in Photoshop to see what tools could I use to further accentuate the image’s theme. And I struck gold! The twirl tool added that extra something I felt was missing in the image. And so the final submission for the challenge is the image you see below – Spinning wheel of colours.

The image has a certain abstract feel to it rather than being a photograph. Almost looks like it’s a portal or a star gate of sorts, doesn’t it?

Till next time, Ciao!