Introduced in 2002, Roomba is a series of autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners sold by iRobot. Under normal house conditions, the Roomba is able to autonomously vacuum the floor while navigating a living space and avoiding obstacles.

Roombas do not map out the rooms they are cleaning. Instead, they rely on a few simple algorithms such as spiral cleaning (spiraling), room crossing, wall-following and random walk angle-changing (after bumping into an object or wall). This design is based on MIT researcher and iRobot CTO Rodney Brooks’ philosophy that robots should ‘be like insects, equipped with simple control mechanisms tuned to their environments‘. The result is that although Roombas are effective at cleaning rooms, they take several times as long to do the job as a person would. Roombas may cover some areas many times, and other areas only once or twice. [Source]

Roombas also come equipped with color-changing LEDs that indicate things like remaining battery power and dirty spots. The LED lights combined with a seemingly random cleaning path has led some intrepid photographers to take long exposure photographs. The results, a kind of ‘light painting’ are mesmerizing.

Some artists have even taken the idea a step further, using multiple roombas in a single room or affixing various colored LEDs to the Roomba to garner a multitude of results. And with no two Roomba paths being the same, the possibilities are endless.

[via Roomba Art on Flickr]

A swarm of seven Roombas, each with a differently colored LED on top. The roombas are operating at the same time. This is part of a “Roomba Art” picture series produced by Tobias Baumgartner, Marcus Brandenburger, Tom Kamphans, Alexander Kroeller, and Christiane Schmidt of the IBR Algorithm Group and Braunschweig University of Technology.

“45 minute exposure of my Roomba cleaning a room. This was my 4th attempt, I repeatedly had the f-stop too low and the resulting noise was too great. The silly bit is that since my floor was very clean after the previous 3 attempts I had to sprinkle dirt in spots to get the blue circles that come from the Roomba spot cleaning.” – Chris Bartle

“I swapped the LEDs around so that the forward velocity reading was feeding the red LED, and was almost always on. The blue and white LEDs lit up whenever the Roomba slowed down or its motion jerked.” – reconscious on Flickr

“Light trail left by iRobot Roomba during its first 30 minutes of cleaning. The wall on the right is illuminated by a LED on Roomba’s base, a place where the robot parks to charge its battery after finishing.” – Alexander Kachkaev

A swarm of seven Roombas, each with a differently colored LED on top. The roombas are operating at the same time. This is part of a “Roomba Art” picture series produced by Tobias Baumgartner, Marcus Brandenburger, Tom Kamphans, Alexander Kroeller, and Christiane Schmidt of the IBR Algorithm Group and Braunschweig University of Technology.

“10 minutes of roomba-ing stacked in Photoshop” – zim2411 on Flickr

A swarm of seven Roombas, each with a differently colored LED on top. The roombas are operating at the same time. This is part of a “Roomba Art” picture series produced by Tobias Baumgartner, Marcus Brandenburger, Tom Kamphans, Alexander Kroeller, and Christiane Schmidt of the IBR Algorithm Group and Braunschweig University of Technology.

“Light trail left by iRobot Roomba during its first 30 minutes of cleaning. A blue circle in the centre of the room is a spot that Roomba found too dirty and did some extra cleaning there. It turns blue LED on when finds such areas and rides around. Red lighting is coming from microwave’s clock! The room was completely dark, however the clock sent enough photons in half an hour to illumine the wall and furniture on the photo. Violet glow in the top-right corner is just imperfection of camera’s sensor and lens.” – Alexander Koachkaev on Flickr

“Camera was mounted to the ceiling using a tripod + duct tape. Each photo was a 30″ exposure at ISO 800, with an 18mm lens at f/4.5. It was about 40 minutes worth, and then I stacked the images in Photoshop. The spiral in the middle is where the roomba started. As the battery lost power, it fades to red.” – zim2411 on Flickr

A swarm of seven Roombas, each with a differently colored LED on top. The roombas are operating at the same time. This is part of a “Roomba Art” picture series produced by Tobias Baumgartner, Marcus Brandenburger, Tom Kamphans, Alexander Kroeller, and Christiane Schmidt of the IBR Algorithm Group and Braunschweig University of Technology.

In this beautiful long exposure photograph by optickarma, we see fans heading home after an England vs Holland friendly at Wembley Stadium on Feb. 29, 2012. The police officers on horseback are clearly not moving much, which really adds to the dramatic effect of this photograph and the movement of so many people.

According to the camera info on Flickr, the exposure was 7 seconds long with a focal length of 23mm at f8 and ISO 200.

For those that are curious, Holland won the game 3-2. Knowing how passionate English fans are about football, the crowd looks to be moving quite orderly!

Svartifoss (Black Fall) is a waterfall in Vatnajökull National Park in Iceland and is one of the park’s most popular sights.

Svartifoss is surrounded by dark lava columns, which gave rise to its name. Other well-known columnar jointing formations are seen at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, USA and on the island of Staffa in Scotland.

The base of this waterfall is noteworthy for its sharp rocks. New hexagonal column sections break off faster than the falling water wears down the edges. These basalt columns have provided inspiration for Icelandic architects, most visibly in the Hallgrímskirkja church in Reykjavík, and also the National Theatre. [Source]

Vatnajökull National Park is one of three national parks in Iceland. It encompasses all of Vatnajökull glacier (the largest in Europe) and extensive surrounding areas. These include the national parks previously existing at Skaftafell in the southwest and Jökulsárgljúfur in the north.

If you’re wondering why the falling water appears that way, it’s because the image is a long exposure photograph where the shutter was left open for 10 seconds.

In this nighttime long exposure photograph by Kaddi Suddhi, we see the famous Pigeon Point Lighthouse in San Mateo, California.

According to the California State Parks website:

“Perched on a cliff on the central California coast, 50 miles south of San Francisco, the 115-foot Pigeon Point Lighthouse, one of the tallest lighthouses in America, has been guiding mariners since 1872. Its five-wick lard oil lamp, and first-order Fresnel lens, comprised of 1,008 prisms, was first lit at sunset, November 15, 1872. The lens stands 16 feet tall, 6 feet in diameter, and weighs 8,000 pounds. It sits in a lantern room that had been constructed at the Lighthouse Service’s general depot in New York before being shipped around the Horn. Although the original Fresnel lens is no longer in use, the lighthouse is still an active U.S. Coast Guard aid to navigation using a 24 inch Aero Beacon.”

The park is located along California Highway 1, 20 miles south of Half Moon Bay and 27 miles north of Santa Cruz. Half hour guided history walks around the lighthouse grounds are available 10am to 4pm Friday through Monday, except on rainy days. Marine mammals, such as seals and whales, can be seen regularly from shore as they pass by beyond the surf. [Source]

To get the shot, Kaddi used: NIKON D300S, Tokina 12-24mm lens @ 16mm focal length, Shutter Speed 190 sec, Aperture f/6.3, ISO 200

The Waitomo Glowworm Caves attraction is a cave at Waitomo on the North Island of New Zealand, known for its population of glowworms, Arachnocampa luminosa. This species is found exclusively in New Zealand. They are around the size of an average mosquito. This cave is part of the Waitomo Caves system that includes the Ruakuri Cave and the Aranui Cave. [Source]

Geological and volcanic activity has created around 300 known limestone caves in the Waitomo region over the last 30 million years. The Waitomo Glowworm Caves were first explored in 1887 by local Maori Chief Tane Tinorau accompanied by an English surveyor Fred Mace.

Tours depart every half hour daily from 9am-5pm. Costs for children are $21 while adults are $48. Families (2 adult/2 children) are $104. The cave is about 2 hours south of Auckland, 1 hour south of Hamilton, and 2 hours west of Rotorua by car. The directions to the Caves are to exit State Highway 3 onto Waitomo Caves Road and to continue on the road for about 8 km.

In Toulouse, France, the metro train is driven by computers. This allows passengers to go to the front of the train and see the tracks ahead. Photographer Éole Wind decided to see what a long exposure would look like as the train went around a bend.

Leaving the shutter open for 5 seconds (f3.5, ISO 100, 22 mm) produced the amazing image you see above which Wind states had no post-effect work done to it. It really conveys a sense of speed and motion, a great capture and well executed!

In this 30 second long exposure photograph by José Eugenio Gómez Rodríguez, we see multiple lightning strikes just outside the city limits of Hermosillo, located in the northwestern state of Sonora, Mexico. Hermosillo is the capital and main economic center for the state and region. It contains almost all of the state’s manufacturing and has thirty percent of its population.

The photograph was taken back in October of 2008 with a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi (30 sec/ƒ 7.1/ISO 200/22 mm).

“Lightning Crashes” is a song by the rock band Live, from their 1994 album, Throwing Copper.

The original Ferris Wheel was designed and constructed by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. as a landmark for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The term Ferris wheel later came to be used generically for all such structures, and Ferris wheels are now the most common type of carnival ride at state fairs in the United States.

Since the original 1893 Chicago Ferris Wheel, there have been eight subsequent world’s tallest-ever Ferris wheels. The current record holder is the 165-metre (541 ft) Singapore Flyer, which opened to the public in March 2008.

In the gallery below (most taken at local fairs and carnivals), we see what Ferris wheels look like when captured using a longer exposure (i.e., shutter left open, typically 2 seconds or more). The lights that adorn the Ferris Wheels blend and blur, creating brilliant patterns and beautiful photos.

[h/t TheMooner on Reddit]

In this amazing night-time scene, we are treated to a lightning show at the Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA. The photograph was taken by Rolf Maeder of photographysedona.com, who drove two hours to the canyon to try to get some sunset shots. As Maeder explains:

“Sometimes an opportunity comes very unexpected. Last week, my friends Scott Stulberg, Holly Kehrt (both wonderful photographers) and I were driving from Sedona to the Grand Canyon to get some sunset shots. After a short time being there we noticed that we couldn’t get what we wanted because of the very hazy light. So we decided to return to Sedona, just shortly checking out some more viewpoints. On the Moran Point we noticed that far away a lightning storm was building up. That was even more than we expected, so we started setting up our tripods and started to take pictures! This shot was taken 9pm with a Nikon D800, 24mm at f/8, ISO 400 and a 25 sec. exposure. – The long exposure made it possible to catch two lightning bolts with one shot! The foreground was light-painted with a flashlight by Scott.”

The Grand Canyon is 277 miles (446 km) long, up to 18 miles (29 km) wide and attains a depth of over a mile (6,000 feet or 1,800 meters). Nearly two billion years of the Earth’s geological history has been exposed as the Colorado River and its tributaries cut their channels through layer after layer of rock.

Moran Point (elevation: 7160 ft / 2182 m) is a popular spot on the South Rim for gazing into the canyon. It is situated near the main park visitor center east of the Grand Canyon Village. According to Sarah Gerke of Arizona State University, the point was likely named after Peter Moran, brother to famous American landscape artist Thomas Moran. It was Peter who traveled to the South Rim in 1881 with explorer and army captain John Bourke. His brother Thomas did not visit until 1892.

If you’d like to order an HD print of this shot you can contact Rolf through his website. You can also sign up for a free monthly wallpaper on his Blog.

This is what happens when you tape a bunch of glow sticks to a ceiling fan, turn the lights out and take a long exposure photograph. Submitted earlier this month to reddit by user jareyjareyjareyjarey, the photographer says he randomly placed about 7 or glow sticks on each blade and then took a 30 second exposure.

The results are reminiscent of a previous post on ‘Long Exposure Photos of a Roomba’s Path‘ from earlier this year. A fun photo challenge that you can try at home if you happen to own a ceiling fan and a lot of glow sticks!

I love projects where artists find creative ways to capture seemingly mundane, everyday things. Take the humble set of traffic lights below. Located somewhere near Weimar, Germany, photographer Lucas Zimmerman set up his camera on a foggy night and started taking 5 – 20 second long exposure photos as the traffic lights shone into the distance.

Lucas was able to play with the colour of the traffic lights by adjusting the ‘temperature’ in post production (hence the green light looking blueish in #4). The ethereal results became a series simply entitled, Traffic Lights.

Lucas has been shooting professionally since 2009, working around the world and holding his first exhibition in Beijing last year. In December of 2012 he partnered with Maria Le Quang and founded LUMA Visual Creations, a photography group based in the German cities of Landau, Würzburg and Weimar. You can find more from both Lucas and LUMA Visual Creations at the online links below.

[h/t reddit]

On display at White Cube Bermondsey in London from January 22 – April 14, 2014 is a new solo exhibition from artist and photographer Darren Almond entitled, To Leave a Light Impression.

In a breathtaking series of night-time landscape photos, Almond takes 12 – 30 minute long exposure photographs under the light of a full moon. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Almond explains:

“With long exposures, you can never see what you are shooting, but you are giving the landscape longer to express itself.”

The ‘Fullmoon’ series have taken Almond to every continent over a period of 13 years. Born in 1971 in Wigan, United Kingdom, Darren Almond lives and works in London. He graduated from Winchester School of Art in 1993 and held his first solo exhibition in 1995. For more information on the exhibit, visit WHITE CUBE.

[via The Guardian, The Financial Times]

Tsuneaki Hiramatsu is an amateur photographer currently living in Okayama, Japan. For the last few years, Tsuneaki has ventured outside of the city centre into the forests of Japan to capture the flight paths of fireflies at night.

To achieve the dreamlike images, Tsuneaki takes a series of 8 second long exposure photographs. He then digitally merges all of the individual photographs into the stacked images you see below. The fireflies light up the forest night and Tsuneaki is there to witness it all and share it with the rest of the world to appreciate.

These are the most recent images in Hiramatsu’s ongoing series. The Sifter first featured the photographer’s amazing work back in May 2012.

To see more, be sure to check out Hiramatsu’s work at the links below.

How cool is this! Photographer Luke Staff took a long exposure of his backlit keyboard while slowly zooming in and this was the result. Luke posted the image to reddit back in December of 2013. In the comments Luke explains how he got the shot:

“Setup the camera tripod, set the camera to manual with ISO 400, 4 sec exposure, and 5.6 aperture then started the exposure, with the shutter open I zoomed the lens pausing at the be[ginn]ing and end. It took a ton of tries to get it right. The room was also completely dark except the keyboard backlight. You can bump the exposure time if you want to use a smaller aperture or ISO. Also depending on how bright the backlight is on your keyboard you may have to lower the ISO anyways. I centered on the letter “L” because my name is Luke.” [source]

For more fascinating long exposure photography featured on the Sifter, see here.

During the Christmas season, public trolleys in Budapest, Hungary are outfitted with over 30,000 twinkling LED lights. The tradition began in 2009 and has been a hit with passengers ever since. The lit up trams have become a beacon for photo ops and creative photographers have found interesting ways to capture them.

In this eight second long exposure photograph by Viktor Varga, the moving tram looks like it’s moving through space and time. Reports of Doc Brown and Mart McFly at the trolley’s helm have yet to be confirmed :)

The Purakaunui Falls are a cascading three-tiered waterfall (20 meters/66 ft tall) on the Purakaunui River, located in The Catlins in the southern South Island of New Zealand. As one of very few South Island waterfalls away from the alpine region, it has long been a popular destination. The falls are an iconic image for The Catlins region and were featured on a New Zealand postage stamp in 1976. [source]

The falls are located 17 km (11 mi) to the southwest of the small town of Owaka and 5 kilometres (3 mi) from the river’s outflow into the Pacific Ocean. They can be reached via a 10-minute bush walk from a car park on the Waikoato Valley / Purakaunui Falls Road, a gravel side-road off the main Owaka-Invercargill road. [source]

Luis Hernan uses long exposure photography and an instrument called a Kirlian Device to try and visualize the wifi signals all around us. On his project website Digital Ethereal, Hernan explains:

The Kirlian Device is an instrument designed to reveal qualities of wireless networks. The device is named after Semyon Davidovich Kirlian, who discovered and perfected a photographic technique to capture electrical coronal discharges.
 
Inside, the device is powered by an Arduino UNO board connected to a Arduino WiFi Shield. Both components process and map the RSSI values of a previously specified SSID network into colour using a heatmap colour scheme. The mapped colours are then passed to a Pololu LED strip. The operation is possible by the use of two 5V lithium batteries. [source]

Hernan continues:

“I believe our interaction with this landscape of electromagnetic signals, described by Antony Dunne as Hertzian Space, can be characterised in the same terms as that with ghosts and spectra. They both are paradoxical entities, whose untypical substance allows them to be an invisible presence. In the same way, they undergo a process of gradual substantiation to become temporarily available to perception. Finally, they both haunt us. Ghosts, as Derrida would have it, with the secrets of past generations. Hertzian space, with the frustration of interference and slowness.”

If you’re interested in trying the visualization yourself, Hernan has built a free Android app called the Kirlian Device mobile which is available through the Google play store.

[via Laughing Squid]

Photographer Fefo Bouvier captured this incredible night time photo of bioluminescent plankton illuminating the water as the Milky Way Galaxy shines above. The photo, which was recently highlighted as NASA’s Earth Picture of the Day, was taken in the Atlantic Ocean at Barra de Valizas, Uruguay where some of the darkest skies in the world can be found.

The photo was taken this past June with an exposure time of 15 seconds. Responsible for the blue glow is Noctiluca scintillans, commonly known as Sea Sparkle. They are a free-living non-parasitic marine-dwelling species of dinoflagellate that exhibit bioluminescence when disturbed.

If you’re interested in prints, they are available through Bouvier’s website.

Seen here are the beautiful Elakala Waterfalls in Blackwater Falls State park, West Virginia, USA. Elakala Falls are a series of four waterfalls.

The first of the series of waterfalls is 35 feet (11 m) in height and is easily accessible from park trails. The remaining three waterfalls of the series are progressively more difficult to access, and have no official marked trails to them. The gorge is nearly 200 feet deep at this section accounting for the difficulty of the descent to the lower waterfalls of the series.

The name of the waterfalls comes from a Native American legend, although several significantly different versions exist. According to one account it involves a princess named Elakala who threw herself over the edge of the first waterfall when her lover scorned her. Another account of the legend involves a Massawomee warrior named Elakala who was girl-shy and fell to his death from the falls while being pursued by two women of his tribe. [source]

This photo, taken by ForestWander Nature Photography, was awarded second place in the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year for 2009.

 
Long Exposure Light Painting with Fireworks by Vitor Schietti
In ‘Impermanent Sculptures‘, artist Vitor Schietti uses a firework to create long exposure, light paintings that only the camera’s eye sees.

The Brazilian-based artist says the time frame to achieve these images is very short, roughly 40 minutes per day, so he’s lucky if he gets 1 or 2 shots. In a press release Vitor delves into the process:

“While some images are acquired in one single exposure, some others are composed by the process of overlaying bits of light paintings from two or more pictures to compose the final image. Apart from this process and some color and contrast adjustments, the result is basically untouched, conceived entirely from real performance with fireworks. By creating these images, which I refer to as Impermanent Sculptures, I draw the viewer’s attention to abstract concepts taking place in real environments.”

Below you will find a selection from the series as well as a detailed explanation for how he created his most popular image, Tree of Life, including a behind the scenes video that shows Vitor using fireworks on a stick to reach the higher areas of the tree.

One of the most successful images, Tree of Life, of a vigorous white tree standing alone before a clean horizon, was achieved overlaying 12 pictures taken consecutively on location, 9 performing light paintings with fireworks in different parts of the three, with the assistance of a long rod which I manipulated from the ground and also from up the canopy, where I climbed while my assistant managed the camera. I also shot 3 pictures firing a flash to illuminate the three as a whole. Nothing was created in Photoshop apart from the process of overlaying images with the lighten blending mode and some contrast and color adjustments.
 
This particular tree is called ‘Cagaita’, it blossoms only during a couple of weeks per year, replacing all its leaves by white flowers when the dry season is coming to an end and the rains begin to fall again.