Over the years, together we’ve dabbled in graphic design, photography + film work, illustration, and web design + code, trading first as sole traders with our own small businesses, then combining them to form a partnership under the name Lightbulb Head. Since having children we’ve folded the business so aren’t currently earning money from our creativity, but that hasn’t stopped us from creating.
In this section there’s a selection of some of the projects that we’ve worked on over the years – scroll down for the most recent, or use the categories on the left to see specific projects.
During the first COVID lockdown in 2020, we spent a few hours putting together a Lego stop-motion animation film recounting the story of Jesus on the road to Emmaus. That first video probably took around 4 or 5 hours to make in total, but over time as we made more and more of these bible story stop-motion videos, we pushed ourselves to create more and more elaborate sets and more ambitious movement. The last video we made probably took around 20 hours to make. You can read more about how we made the videos in a blog post from July 2020
In 2017, we wrote a small python script for a RaspberryPi that would take a photo every 15 minutes in the daytime (calculated based on the python astral library) using an attached webcam and add a watermark and upload the picture to the web. Then, once a month in the hours of darkness, the code would generate a video timelapse (averaging the white balance of each picture) and upload that to the web. In 2018, we set up a raspberry pi and webcam in the orchard at Penhurst Retreat Centre and set it going… with limited success! The above is one of the resulting videos where the whole month worked!
Charles Bridge in Prague is known for its hustle and bustle, but one of the most striking memories of my first visit to Prague in the 1990s was the beauty and tranquillity of the bridge. In order to re-discover that tranquillity, we got up early one morning on our travels to capture the golden morning light and the transition from stillness to bustle. Surprisingly, the quietest time on Charles Bridge wasn’t at 5:30 when we arrived, but around 6:30. From then, it just got busier until the stalls were all set up and the crowds had reached their mean daytime density by 10:15am, at which point we stopped the camera. 12fps using shots taken every 10 seconds for around 4 and a half hours
As we travelled around Europe in our trusty motorhome Bertha, we had originally planned to accompany our blogging with a video diary too. We got to video number 3 and realised that actually we were spending just as much time editing the video as we were living the experience, so we carried on filming, but left the editing until our return to the UK. And then life happened… so here are the 3 original videos. There may be more in future (as we are sitting on over 40 hours of footage!) but possibly in a different format
Steve photographed over 30 weddings since he was first asked to stand in at the last minute as a photographer at a friend’s wedding in 2005 through to the last one in 2013. The style majored in more on trying to capture natural moments from afar rather than staged photos – but always taking the lead from the couple getting married (hence the three shots above that were staged)! Most were under the branding of “SRPhotos”, but the final couple were under the branding of “Lightbulb Head”.
Before we moved out of London we wanted to do a timelapse of a busy junction near our flat… so with the permission of the vicar of St. Mark’s Kennington church, we set up a time lapse as dusk fell of the junction at Oval tube station leaving the camera to take a picture every 3 seconds.
When on holiday in Cornwall in 2013 we wanted to capture the sea consuming the causeway to St. Michael’s Mount. We had a minor creative disagreement as to the composition for the first part of the time lapse (should we focus on the silhouette of St. Michael’s Mount, or people crossing the causeway?), but that doesn’t really matter as after an hour and a half we chose to move to a better location anyway! The tide times really were perfect as it was slowly getting dark just as the sea was lapping over the top of the causeway. We won’t lie – it was absolutely freezing sitting with the camera, but it was also incredibly beautiful.
After 6 years of photographing weddings, it was hard to break the habit for our own wedding – so we decided to set up a camera to take a picture every minute in the 2 days prior to the wedding and on the day itself. It’s not every groom that has to think about changing camera batteries, timelapse controller batteries and memory cards (we ended up filling four 4GB cards!) in the build-up to the wedding!
3D photography is something that I was massively into for a few years, starting when 3D films were beginning to make a resurgence at the cinema and 3D televisions were just entering the market. In that time I bought a Fujifilm W1 3D camera and a couple of 3D Loreo lenses so that I could take stereoscopic images using my existing SLRs. I even offered the option of a few stereoscopic photos at weddings for a short time. The issue for me was always how to view the photographs afterwards; lenticular prints (ridged prints that let your right and left eye see different images) were the best option, but I also gave online options red / cyan anaglyphs (viewable using red / cyan glasses) or stereoscopic pictures (viewable using stereoscopic glasses, or by using the “magic eye” technique of going slightly cross-eyed). This also led me to write a script to process the .mpo files the Fujifilm W1 3D into these options, which is now available on GitHub
