In this post I’ll briefly explain how to take photographs like this one.

Just like my previous post on shooting sprinklers, this isn’t exactly the most practical of tutorials. Sorry.

All you need is a small point and shoot camera with an attached wrist-strap. For the examples in this post, I used a Sony DSC-P200:

You’ll need to be able to control the shutter speed of the camera. Most point-and-shoots should have some way for you to do this. Take a look at your instruction manual if you’re not sure how to. For my point-and-shoot, I can control the shutter speed by shooting in manual mode:

Choose how long you want the shutter to stay open for. I set shutter speed at 30 seconds for the examples in this post, which is the maximum the camera allows.

Once you’ve chosen your shutter speed, find a dark place (you’ll probably want to do this at night), press the shutter, hold the camera by the strap, and start swinging your camera around like a madman. Make sure your strap is sturdy so that your camera won’t accidentally fly off of it.

Afterwards, you might have overexposed your image if you kept the shutter open too long with too much light.

A little Photoshopping can help you get the look you want:

Things to experiment with for interesting results:

• Location
• Shutter speed
• Color of the lights around you
• How you swing the camera

Good luck!