Long time painting

I've been distracted by Instagram for last year or so, you can check me out here.
http://web.stagram.com/n/molescat/

The above shot is a classic long exposure and light painting, taken at the start of this year.
The camera is set to manual focus (mostly because the auto-focus struggles in low light).
Time priority of say 30 seconds, a manual flash is triggered to exposure the subject, then you paint in the "art". The beauty of this technique, over say just doing it in Photoshop, is you actually get the correct radiosity off the painted light for free. I think that's what makes these kinds of photos look so compelling.

I realized when describing this technique to a friend, that I have been experimenting with Light Painting for over twenty years now - which was a scary thought.  When I started, it was all on film of course, and we had no idea whether it was working how we wanted it or not.  You would think I'd have mastered it by now.

Old school, taken on film:

Tron Legocy

Inspired by
http://gizmodo.com/#!5787259/shooting-challenge-lego

I've kind of done this thing before - back in 1990, some twenty one years ago - ouch.
But back then I didn't have Lightroom or an iPad to help with the cool effects.
I really need to get myself a macro lens, shooting this on 300mm, 2m away is really fiddly - you need to take great care not bump the frame, or even have the frame droop, with a heavy lens you need to lock in a quarter frame higher to compensate for the droop. You also need to turn off the image stabilizer, and auto focus, as they are just going to mess things up with a time lapse shot.
I was going to try some extra effects to get a lego light-cycle in there, but the set up was already a 30sec shot.
And a double exposure was just going to make everything really complicated.