Here's another series of gimmick shots from me. In the Wonder of Life pavilion they have a lot of illusions, optical or otherwise. One that always amused me was dressed up as a magic want, it's a vertical line of LEDs being held by a cartoon Merlin. What you're supposed to do is sweep your vision across it from one side to the other, creating a similar effect to those things they have where you swing a thing around in a circle and it creates a message out of a line of flashing LEDs. I always had difficulty getting the illusion to work right, but I could get it to work just enough to be fascinated by it. Basically it works because by sweeping your vision across it you're scanning sequential lines of an image into your retina, the persistence of vision keeps the after image there long enough for the whole image to be briefly visible. So I figured I'd try sweeping my camera's field of view across the LEDs instead. It turns out it's a difficult trick to pull off. It's harder still to explain the mechanics of the operation, how I had to get the camera moving from one side to the other and release the shutter at just the right time, but that it was too heavy for me to stop it moving after I had moved it past the LEDs and I often ended up getting glare from the brighter areas behind the wall.. I never really got my camera moving or turning fast enough, all the images were squashed. It was a problem of inertia, you can pan your eyes a lost faster than I can pan a camera, and the system was designed for eyes. As you can see the mechanism is in need of a bit of maintenance, with what looks like one dead LED and others of varying brightness. Still it's a neat system. One of only two of the illusions that I felt would work on camera. I still need to get the image files from the other one I tried.
