It’s raining light! Clever photo series mixes ping pong balls and blacklights to great effect

 

 

What would you do with 500 table tennis balls, a blacklight, and a photo location with an incline in it? If you're photographer Marcus Schindler from Germany, what you'd do is to use the ping pong balls both as a long-exposure subject and light source, casting an eerie light-painted glow under the blacklight. 

Marcus is the videographer behind the stop-motion animated clip, "The Old Man and the Sea", which documents the illustration of Ernest Hemingway's book of the same name. The clip went viral some time back, and has now reached over half a million views on Vimeo.

You can get a glimpse for the work involved -- just collecting all the ping pong balls for each reshoot must take quite a while -- by watching the short Making Of video below:

A number of the final shots from Marcus' new table tennis ball photo series are on photography magazine ISO 1200, which first brought them to our attention -- and we're glad, because they really are quite eyecatching. (Our favorite: The third image, with the balls gushing firehose-like from the end of a curving pipe.)

See more shots from Marcus' other projects -- as well as behind-the-scenes stills from the ping pong shoots -- on his personal website.

(via ISO 1200)