Glow in the Dark Photography Fun…with kids!

After a fun dinner with friends, we came home early on New Year’s Eve to put Natalie to bed. Such is our life with small kids. But I don’t mind. We created some of our own fun at home.

We broke out the glow sticks for bath time, and then carried them into the living room for a hyper, crazy dance party with the two older boys.

Eventually our dance party led to some really cool night photography.

It’s a pretty simple project, but you’ll need a dSLR.

*Set your ISO to about 1600.
*Set your camera on a tripod or a flat surface. I used the top of our arm chair.
*Adjust your shutter speed to about 15 seconds. Yep, not 1/15 of a second. A full 15 seconds.

*Oh, and you need a small light source: a small flash light, led light, sparklers, or in our case glow sticks.

*Ask your subjects to hold still and press the shutter button. If your lens is on auto focus it can sometimes take awhile for the camera to focus well enough to take the picture. I keep it on auto focus because I don’t trust my manual focusing ability, especially in the dark.

*Once the shutter opens, any movement will be picked up into a whirlwind or a flurry of light.

Neat right?

You can try writing with your light as well. I was the only one interested in that though. 🙂

The boys kept trying to make it look like they were Ninjagoes using their spinjitzu. 🙂

This was such a fun family activity that appealed to everyone. My husband and I have done it as an at home date night before, but have never done it with our kids. They absolutely had a ball.

Hey and if you need more New Year celebration ideas to do with your kids, I wrote an article for What to Expect’s website. Go here to read it.

Their site was down for the holidays, so it’s a bit late, but I shared a few ideas that would be appropriate for almost any celebration with kids.

We had an invitation to go to dinner with friends so we weren’t able to do everything that I mention in the article. We did do family activities new and old and had a great time. I love holidays like New Years because it’s laid back and just pure fun.

I hope you all have the most wonderful 2013!

Have a great weekend!

P.S. Oh and if you are having deja vu with this post, I accidentally posted it earlier this week. 😉