Holographium review

We review Holographium, an iPhone app that paints real-life light graffiti on your digital photos

Light painting is a fascinating concept, and a great many clever photographers have performed some outstanding works of art using light as a real-world paint brush.

You may even have experienced it yourself by accident, when taking a photo at night. A torch trail snakes its way around the picture, while you and the background are clearly stationary.

This is achieved by leaving the camera’s shutter open for an extended period of time - around 10 seconds minimum according to the Holographium iPhone app.

Taking light painting digital, the idea behind this app is that you can display a hovering, real-world 3D banner anywhere you like, complete with all the reflections and shadows such a banner would leave on surrounding objects.

The Holographium process begins by entering the text you want to display in your light graffiti. You can then choose a colour from a basic palette, and determine the pseudo-depth you’d like to give to your floating letters.

At this point you’re required to set up your digital camera. The images aren’t taken using the iPhone’s camera, but a digital camera equipped with a variable shutter speed.

A tripod is pretty much a necessity, with the camera ready and waiting with the required image in its viewfinder.

The shutter speed of the camera is entered into Holographium, so it knows how long to leave images on the iPhone’s screen. Once all this is done, you press the shutter button on the camera, and hold the iPhone in mid-air wherever you want the light painting to appear in the photo.

Moving the iPhone from left to right, in time with the shutter speed (for example, taking 12 seconds to move from one end of the banner to the other), the text will be processed by the app to appear as floating 3D words on the exposed photograph.

This sounds quite complex and difficult to perform when reading the description, and it is. Getting the timing right, putting the camera in position, ensuring the ambient light is right, and getting clear of the viewfinder before the shutter closes is no small task.

The results are as promised, however. The strange shapes you see on the iPhone’s screen during the calculated animation miraculously turn into 3D light, hovering in mid air.

Be prepared for a lot of attempts to get it right, with a lot of photos coming out with squashed or blurred text, unreadable angles and an intrusive haziness from the iPhone operator, but with persistence Holographium can create some very cool images that even photoshop would be hard pressed to recreate.

]]>