Cleaning your house can be pretty boring basically because it eats into your photography time. So here is how to combine both cleaning and photography. Try doing light paintings with robot vacuum cleaners.
Photography Tools
For this, you will need a vacuum cleaner. For example, a Samsung Navibot because it’s got some LED lights on the top (as shown in the video), but any other robot vacuum cleaner that you have access to should be fine.
A DSLR and a wide angle lens. You can use the 18-55mm lens that came with your DSLR, just make sure you use it around the 18-35mm mark.
You‘ll also need a remote shutter release because you’ll be shooting in bulb mode, so you’re going to need to release the shutter remotely.
And finally you'll need a tripod or something sturdy to keep your camera on while it’s taking photos over the course of a couple of minutes.
Preparation
Next step is to set up your DSLR, put it on the tripod, and find bulb mode. In some cameras, this is found in your manual exposure mode (keep flicking the shutter speed dial until you find the ‘B’). On other cameras, there’s a specific mode on the dial that is denoted by ‘B’.
Then set your aperture. You'll probably want to set something between F8-F11 to get started with. You want it reasonably narrow so that you’re just getting the light from your robot vacuum cleaner.
Your shutterspeed is determined by your shutter release.
Taking the Picture
There’s no particular best time to leave your shutter. Try and experiment around 2-3minutes to get started. Take a look and see what kind of light trails your cleaner is leaving. If you’re finding you’re not seeing enough of the light trails, you might want to open up your aperture, so move it down to something like F5.6 or even lower if your camera lets you.
Now that you’ve played around with some of the effects that are given from using the built in LED lights, we can get a bit more creative. Think about buying a batter-powered LED. This will be a little bit stronger. You can attach it to the top of your robot vacuum cleaner and let it go.
And finally, get super creative with two or more robot vacuum cleaners by putting them both on the floor at the same time and letting them go. It’s also possible to even do some cool experiments like putting colored cellophane over the light to get some interesting effects.
