The Blacklight Blog

New Direction

Being a guest author poses some complications for designing and maintaining a blog, since I can't really adjust the look of the blog, I need ideas as to what the readers want.  I do apologize to anyone who is looking for new content on a daily or weekly  basis, things have been hectic so I have been unable to contribute. 

With halloween right around the corner, has anyone used blacklights or blacklight reactive materials in a holiday display?  Let me know and send pictures so I can showcase those designs here!

Free Publicity

Looking for mor great blacklight uses, pick up October 2008 issue of Martha Stewart Living and see some great ideas with products you can find at blacklight.com

Here is a little taste of what you can fnd

www.blacklight.com/MarthaStewartLiving

For more in depth instructions on how to create the scenes, buy a copy of the magazine!

How am I doing?

Well? 

Is there any thing any one wants to talk about in the blacklight world?  Like I said in a prior post, blacklights are awesome!  If you haven't checked out anything blacklight reactive then you should.  If you need suggestions for what to use a blacklight for leave a comment for me.  If you want to purchase something blacklight, check out blacklight.com

With halloween right around the corner, there are tons of things you can do with blacklights.  Check out what one reader did with blacklight by following this link: http://www.blacklight.org/customer_comments_feedback/index.html

Therese is one creative person.  I would love to see what else people are doing, shoot me an email with your pics and ideas and they might make it up here.

Chuck

Time for School

What is blacklight?  Since it is time to start heading back to school, I thought I would take you readers to the dreaded "S" word, as my 10 year old nephew likes to call it, and give you the scientific defination of blacklight.

We all know of UV rays from the sun, and how normal looking objects can sometimes glow under light of certain wavelengths.  The definition of Ultraviolet (blacklight), according to Wikipedia is

Ultraviolet (UV) light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength shorter than that of visible light, but longer than X-rays. It is named because the spectrum consists of refrangible electromagnetic waves with frequencies higher than those that humans identify as the color violet.

If you really want to read more about UV light you can go to Wikipedia and read about it. (Whew! That's a mouthful)

That's enough school for me!  Blacklight is cool and does some cool things and makes things look really cool.  If it wasn't, then why would anyone devote so much time to it.  As I said it is cool, and you can do some really cool things with it, illuminate posters, find scorpions, use it in forensics, fraud detection, all kinds of stuff.  If you want to wow your friends, take an ordinary credit card, expose it to blacklight, and see what is actually on those plain looking cards.  Try it with money as well.  Do you want to see if your bathroom is really clean?  Take a blacklight and shine it around in there.  You may be amazed at what you see! (This is not recommended for the faint of heart)

If you have some other cool things you have done with blacklight, we would love to know about it.  Email me your pictures and descriptions.

Have a great weekend, and I will talk to you next week.

Chuck

The end of summer

Summer is over.  Time to go back to school.  Blacklight.com has plenty of cool stuff for all you college students to decorate your space, to help you get the gear you need, you can enter the following ecoupon BLOG at checkout to save an additional 10% off our already low prices.

Talk to you soon

Chuck

RSS

Hey,

Welcome back.  Just wanted to let you know that we have an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed available from our blog which you can suscribe to, so that you can keep up to date with the goings in the world of Blacklight.

Chuck

Time to get ready for summer!

Well it is that time of the year again....schools ended, vacation is starting (maybe work for some), but most of all it is time to recharge the old batteries and start looking ahead to fall..yeah it is a way off but it's never to early to start preparing.

Let me just start by saying my name is Chuck, Troy will be posting sometimes as well, but I will be handleing most of the bloging.  I am a total novice to this, but I am here to help you out.  I will answer your questions as best I can, and if I don't have the answer I will find it for you, so don't hesitate to ask.  I will also turn you on to exciting ways to use blacklight, hopefully ways you never thought of, and if you have something to share...DO IT!

Seen somethng you like but can't find it on Blacklight.com then just ask, we may be able to get you going. 

One more thing, if you like something I am doing, let me know.  If you hate what I am doing, let me know.  Our readers and fellow blacklight enthusiasts can always reach me.  Just send me an email.

Chuck

chuck@blacklight.com

Table Hockey Highlighting

Here's some examples of another way to use blacklight paint and tape to accent Table Hockey Games.   Use the tape to do long strips and the paint for smaller details. Thanks Dwayne for the pics and ideas.

Halloween Decorationg Project

Sure - go ahead and post my stuff. It would be nice to see a blog that addresses the growing cfb and led effects markets in a user-friendly manner - a lot of people don't understand the technical aspects of alternate lighting, so they fall back on incandescent lamps.

Might be fun to do some writing... thinking....

I've learned a lot about lighting and wiring just from setting up my landscape lights and the 5 years of Halloween decorating. Decorating the house is an odd combination of stage and disco lighting, sound production (we do our own loops), prop-making and background painting. And being able to splice and dice wires and fixtures without being electrocuted!! =-O

Incorporating some of what I've learned into everyday life has been fun too - our home office is set up with optional "mood" lighting for online gaming sessions (you can't play WoW with white lights blinding you) and for grey, dreary days - we just pull our blackout curtains shut, hit the remote, and snug down into a very soothing environment...

I hope you continue adding led products to your catalog; I've been watching them for about 2 years now and am finally seeing "useable" bulbs entering the market, thanks to Cree. I just received my first trial order of landscape replacement lights that will work in my current low-voltage system and am awaiting the arrival of a few new gen 120v bulbs.

Please send my regards to Troy - he handled last year's order for me and was very helpful.

Thanks,

Therese
ps - this is what I do with all the stuff I buy from you.

Halloween's a coming...

Well it's time to start decorating for Halloween.  Are you making a blacklight room, haunted house, Halloween display or planning a Halloween party?  Here are some suggestions:

1.  Do not use incandescent light bulbs, you know the ones you buy from your local Walmart, Target, or hardware store.  These bulbs give off very little blacklight effect and extreme heat.  I've personally burned the underside of my arm on one of these and the burn mark was there for four months.  Instead I recommend compact fluorescent blacklight bulbs for a real blacklight effect, the newer UV Led Blacklight bulbs, or of course the normal tube style fluorescent lights.  The more wattage you have for a fluorescent the better the blacklight effect.  One 48" blacklight will usually light up a 12' x 12' area fairly well.  The other key is to have plenty of blacklight reactive items to make the areas seem like they have more light then they actually do.  What's the point of having a blacklight if you don't have anything that reacts to it?

2.  Use plenty of blacklight reactive items for a great effect.  Items like fluorescent or glow in the dark tape are great for making removable designs or marking walkways.  Fluorescent paint is great painting your own designs or doing a splatter effect on walls.  It can also be used on skin and clothing although we wouldn't recommend it for long time usage on the skin.  No one wants blocked pores.  Also, for clothing obviously use it on clothing that is specifically for this purpose.  Don't put it on your $1,000 Gucci dress.  Glow in the dark stars or paint can add that outer space feeling to ceilings and walls.  Try making a black room with glow in the dark stars or stickers and having someone in all black with the same stickers.  They will disappear into the background.  There is also invisible blacklight reactive paint.  This is great for a white room that you want to turn the lights off and have a design appear out of nowhere.  Definitely recommend a white background for this.  They're are also blacklight reactive balloons, stars, beaded curtains, makeup, blacklight reactive bubbles, blacklight posters, etc to help finish off any room.

3.  Use invisble ink for readmissions.  You can get your own custom rubber stamp, a stamp pad and invisible ink.  Then you can see who's  supposed to be there and who isn't.  It can be used for other things to like marking tickets, contests where the winning 'ticket' has an invisible ink mark on it.

4.  Strobe lights are always a good thing for Halloween.  The super fast flashing helps to disorient and give that slow motion effect.  Just be sure to warn people that you are using them as the fast flashing lights can set off epileptic seizures.

If you have other ideas or questions about an idea.  Comment to this post or email me direct to request to become an author on the Blacklight Blog at Blacklight.org.