Glow Stick Xylophone

"Glow stick xylophone. Put the glow sticks in cups of water and an aura comes off in the dark, when you tap them. Probably the coolest thing ever."

Ah yes, another glow stick pin. Sadly, short of taking illegal drugs, this isn't going to work. It doesn't work that way. 

Kuro! : joo0ey

It's just the effect of long light exposure from her camera, nothing more. Long light exposure is how they get all of those really fun photos you can find everywhere online, like this one on the left. It's done by adjusting settings on your camera. SLRs are recommended but modern day click and point digital cameras can also do this. The real trick is making sure you have a tripod or something completely stable to set your camera on, switch your camera over to manual mode and then messing with the shutter speed of your camera. There's a lot of great how to guides online, but I've found it's best to have fun, go out and do it yourself. I have even written about a great "How to use your camera" blog post on a previous Good Idea Friday, which you can find here.

In fact, if you actually click over to the website where the image comes from, she even states "The aura is just an effect from the camera" So, what does the glow sticks in a cup of water really look like? 

Glow stick water cups : Play At Home Mom LLC

So there you go - still kinda fun and neat, a great play item for the kidos on a rainy evening, but nothing special, no auras, no glowing tubes of light shooting out of the glasses.

Good Idea Friday - Learning To Use Your Camera

Photograph tutorial : It's Over Flowing

A little something different for this Friday's Good Idea...

Some of you may know in my spare time I run an online jewelry store, which requires a ton of photos to be taken. I don't own a DLSR, (though I wouldn't mind having one, it's not in the budget) so for now my mid-rang Sony DSC HX works well enough. But I didn't start out with anything more than your basic point and click, and not having a freaking clue in what I was doing.

So I did what anyone would do; I turned to the internet. I tried to read page after page of how to do different settings from white balance to aperture, but honestly most of them just made my eyes go cross. I just wasn't getting it. Even after getting my Sony I still had no idea what I was doing. My photography friends tried to help me, but I was feeling like I was a hopeless case.

Cue the blog post I'm sharing today - Out of every thing I've read on photography, this blog I found on Pinterest was the first to make me GET it.

So my Good Idea Friday post is to go out there, grab your camera, and read this blog. Even your most basic point and shoot camera can do a lot of these settings, so I recommend ether reading the manual or finding a PDF of it online. You might find that you don't NEED a super fancy camera to shoot amazing photos, which comes in handy if you're blogging or running an etsy shop or just trying to take a great shot of your kids.