Night light doodling…

… a way for kids to photograph, frame and learn to like the dark.

At 6, No1 child knows how to change themes. Opening the laptop is interesting as he has a DaVinci thing going on, the old Ubuntu box has been tripped out in hippy-trippy-ness, and now the PS3 has been tweaked too. But the new theme is so cool, it’s got these light doodle things that I last saw on the Chili’s Fortune Faded vid.

Being enquiring minds we trawled the interweb to find that these things in animated form are part of the Pikapika Project. So we set about cooking up a welikeplay kid friendly way… and it’s so much fun.

You will need:
to get your paws on a digital camera with a night picture setting and timer
a tripod, or in our case a stool on top of the kitchen table
the night or really thick curtains
a led torch or two
some cheap balloons

Prop the camera up, set it to night mode for a slow shutter speed and press the timer. Run round to the business end and start drawing pictures in the air with your torch over and over again. When the camera goes beep, bleep, pause, ker-click (well ours does), run back to see what the piccy looked like. Repeat to your hearts desire, using baloons to cover the led to get different colours. Crop & keep, and…

enjoy.

tag... play for today, 3up, 5up, 8up, enjoy and achieve, makes