Photography 1 - Early Digital Magic at NID

Where borrowed DSLRs, laser pointers, and patient friends created the foundation for everything that followed

Back in 2010, owning a DSLR was the kind of luxury that felt as distant as owning a spaceship. These cameras were the holy grail for anyone serious about visual arts, and at NID, they were passed around like sacred artifacts. When someone finally managed to borrow one for the night, word spread quickly through the dorms, and suddenly you had a crew of eager collaborators ready to experiment until dawn.

Light painting with lasers taught us humility in the most beautiful way. Every tiny tremor, every slight movement of the hand, was captured with brutal honesty by that expensive piece of glass. What looked like smooth, flowing gestures in real life transformed into jagged, chaotic scribbles when the shutter closed. 

It was both frustrating and fascinating—a lesson in precision that would later prove invaluable in animation work. Our friends became willing models for hours, standing perfectly still in the grass outside the dorms or posed dramatically in common rooms, while we wielded those tiny red dots like digital paintbrushes against the darkness.

  


These light painting sessions were more than just creative fun—they were unconscious training for the animation work that would define many of our later careers. We were learning about timing, movement, persistence of vision, and the relationship between time and image. The discipline required to create a clean light stroke was excellent preparation for the frame-by-frame patience that animation demands. Looking back, those late-night experiments with borrowed equipment and laser pointers were the perfect bridge between traditional art-making and digital creation.