Rayograms

For our workshop today, we created rayograms which involves placing objects on light sensitive paper.

Rayograms were popularised by Man Ray, hence their name. Here is one of his films which feature many of his rayograms:

During my foundation art and design course I worked in a dark room so I knew some of the principles but I had only used negatives so this was quite different.

For my rayogram I used twigs. First I created a test strip to see how long I needed to expose the paper.

 

 This shows strips of 5, 10, 15 and 20 seconds.

I decided I prefered the darker strip so I exposed a whole piece of paper for 20 seconds. 

I held some of the twigs up above the paper and this makes them look brighter and unfocused. I think if I had done a lot more of this it would have looked very interesting and the blurred lines make it seem spooky, but I didn't have enough hands to hold anymore!

I'm not sure if rayograms will work for my animation as I want to create a story based idea and rayograms are much more abstract.