playing around with ultraviolet

[solarbird]

 
low light and normal light

Friends held a solstice party and traditionally it's held in the dark except for lights people bring, so I made hidden (in my cuffs) LED ultraviolet light emitters ("blacklight") and drank drinks mixed with tonic water so they would fluoresce.

Also I could point at things and they'd glow. (Sometimes.)

It's much more violet than it looks in these pictures, I'm not sure what's up with my camera making it so blue. But it might be because I see ultraviolet as, well, violet, but more.

(I'm always the one playing with UV at these things, because I'm the one who can actually see it. But everyone can see the other bits, and also, these LEDs also put out a bit of just straight up visible violet-range light, probably so people with conventional vision can see they're on.)

Comments

[tornir]

Camera sensors are reactive to IR/UV wavelengths humans can't see, and their image encoding format is restricted to storing information for only red, green, and blue. To prevent the image looking odd, the sensors have a cut filter fitted which blocks out those extra wavelengths, so what's being recorded is only the colours most people see.

[solarbird]

Oh, I know.

I had fights about colour all through art school. And I always struggled to get flower photographs that matched what I saw. Took forever to figure out why, but eventually, I did.

[alwaysbeenasmiler]

Oh the colour of those drinks makes me want to grabby hands

[solarbird]

Two UV ultrabright LEDs per hand, in series, 9v battery, resistor... 90 ohms, but of course it'd depend upon your exact LEDs. (These were 3.2-3.8V forward voltage, 20ma. Gives you a range of.... something like... 70 to 130 ohms, I think? The lower resistance, the brighter, but the harder you're pushing the LEDs.)

My favourite comment - and I got variations of this from two people - was, "I'm impressed and a little bit afraid of you," with the same third party in both cases saying, "That's pretty much the right way to react to her in general." (ღ˘⌣˘ღ)

[tereshkova2001]

Next year I'm going to push for the dark environment and have everyone bring lights--I honestly forgot to say so in the event post.

[solarbird]

I'll have them ready for next year!

And I'll add something new, of course. I hope. I had a thought or two already...

[melchar]

Simply gorgeous effect!

[solarbird]

And for so little work! I knocked them together in about an hour and a half, including all the fiddily bits to make them comfortable and stable.

[stickmaker]

Were you singing "I Get No Kick from Champagne"? :-)

Or maybe "The Chemist's Drinking Song."

I love playing with UV lights, though too much makes my eyes vaguely itchy, and that's through eyeglasses. The flashlight I keep in the nightstand to use when checking mysterious noises which wake me is a multi-LED UV device.