The other night before heading back from Vegas, my friend Jeremy walked out of the dollar store to present me with a bundle of glowsticks. I kind of nervously smiled, expecting this to be the punch line to another playful stab at my raver past.

I asked him ”So, what’s the plan for those?” to which he responded with “I don’t know, but probably something awesome”

Trying to find a good use for glow sticks sounded like a fun challenge, so while driving through the pitch black desert toward Los Angeles, I decided to pull off to what was probably the most desolate exit in all of North America to try something I had never attempted with my camera, before. Drawing with light.

Everything that was said as we got further from any sort of civilization, fit the bill for being quoted in the horror film that would be made about us (ya know, just two ravers lookin’ for a place to party), later on:

• “This looks like a good place to pull over”
• “Did you hear that?”
• “It was probably just a dog”
• “I’ll go check it out”
• “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”

Another thing I said a lot for the first couple of minutes of showing Jeremy how to make a glow stick light up while twiddling with my camera was the term “bear with me”

It was the first time I had decided to play with long exposure so, like most things in my life, I learned though a couple of stabs at trial and error.

In order to achieve what I was going for, heres what I eventually switched my settings to:

I propped the camera on the trunk of car and made Jeremy stand in the road with the glow sticks so that I could use the manual focus, to find him. Then we just made some raver art!

(insert DJ unce-unce’s new dub-step album here)

Almost all of the shots were set so that we could hold the light, and flail around for 30 seconds, before the shutter closed. So we pretty much did the stereotypical things you would do if you were presented with this situation.

(from upper left, to lower right) Make a series of lowest common denominator shapes; tag your initials in the sky; do a fruity glow stick dance while your friend laughs hysterically at you for 30 seconds; and explain how cool nature is.

We also made several attempts at drawing the symbol for Jeremys band

I think looks pretty rad if you can see it like this instead of some buttholes floating in the sky.

Jeremy jokingly representing his being straightedge/ a documentation of the place where we found a buried treasure!

For spending an hour in the middle of a pitch black desert at midnight, I would say that we PAC’t in a a lot of fun.