Buckyballs meet LED light

Not much time today, so just a repost of two photos, with extra and new information.

Buckyballs (not the molecules, but the toys) are small, powerful, rare-earth magnets that, as magnets do, stick together. You can build all sorts of structures with them, but they are not exactly Lego: the magnetic fields have to align and "fit", so you can't just build anything you want.

Photo by David Eppstein, from Wikimedia under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence

Making flat patterns, cubes and tube shapes is easy enough, but building arbitrary 3D structures is very difficult, and sometimes they just won't fit together the way you want them; you don't have full control of the end result. Still, with a little experience, some trial-and-error, and much cursing, interesting geometric shapes can be built, and even more free-form shapes are doable.

Here's one I made, photographed using red LED light to give it some colour:

Olympus Stylus 1s, 42mm, ISO100, f8, 10s

I call it "Piranha". It looks a bit scary, but I often seem to end up with things that look a bit devilish when building little sculptures with these magnetic balls. Here's another one I made and photographed:

Olympus Stylus 1s, 42mm, ISO100, f8, 3.2s

I call it "Friendly Little Devil", but you can call it anything you like 8-).

Both photos were made using LED lighting only. Using LEDs as a light source for photograpy isn't always the best way to go, because of the limited colour spectrum LEDs have. Even white LEDs have nowhere near the colour spectrum of natural light, and this can lead to some rather unpleasant surprises. As an aside: many so-called LED TVs (only the backlight is done with LEDs, so it is a marketing misnomer) actually have a smaller colour gamut than the older ones that use CCFL backlights.

I like to experiment with LEDs as light sources though, especially in photos like this. One of the disadvantages turned into an advantage is, that coloured LEDs are very monochrome, so you can easily tune the colour in Photoshop to anything you want.