I crafted this small circuit from bus wire, solder, SMD LEDs, resistors, transistor, and an ATTiny45 IC.
I programmed the Arduino to create the flicker effect and fade out, and used shellac to isolate the bus wire where necessary.
Lighting and photographing LEDs (esp surface mount!) is a challenge. Some notes for next time:
- Turn the auto focus off and the macro setting on.
- Set white balance to outdoors for LEDs
- Lots of light + high F stop = wide depth of field
- Clean clean clean the back drop
- Use Highest quality setting, makes it possible to zoom in and crop later
- Maybe try a neutral density filter?
A few things I learned tinkering in Photoshop with these pics:
- Sharpen tool is awesome. More of that.
- Bring blown-out LED color back by using magic wand to select color (non-continguous). Sample size 3x3, tolerance of 10.
Image adjustments menu> hue/saturation. Select the color under the second drop down menu, adjust the saturation for it.