If you're looking for a fun photo project for your family, night photography is one way to go. In this episode of Gear Daddy, Daddy Troy shares some photography tips on how to create cool images with your kids. Using sparklers, glow sticks, and flashlights and a few camera shutter and flash tricks, you can create some fun pictures. Check out how to create ghost pictures and how glow in the dark items can give you some of the most interesting photographs. DadLabs Ep. 601 is brought to you by BabyBjorn.

Daddy Troy: Welcome back to Gear Daddy. I'm Daddy Troy. Today's topic - taking nighttime photos of your kids. Specifically using sparklers, glow sticks, flashlights, as well as how to take some ghost images. So let's start with a camera. There's not a big camera lesson here. I'm just gonna show you two things. Number one, you're gonna put your camera in the manual mode. You see that I have it on M right here. You'll also want to learn how to set the shutter and the aperture once you're in manual mode. And finally, the last last thing, little pop up flash on most cameras, sometimes you're going to use the pop up flash. That's it. Let's start with some images from my kids birthday party. We held a glow in the dark party and as party favors we gave away the glow in the dark necklaces and the wrist bracelets. And true to fashion, the kids ended up twirling them so we decided to separate them a little bit, try to keep the safety on. First shot right here, you see that I have the flash off and I left the shutter open for 2 seconds, which is enough time for a kid to go a bunch of revolutions around with one of the glowsticks. I really like this image because you can see the banding, the different colors, and it kind of reminds me of some sort of model of the atom or orbital mechanics. In this image, I also left the shutter open for 2 seconds but I left the flash in order to freeze the subject and then left the shutter open while he twirled it around. In this next image I also used the flash in order to freeze the subject then left the shutter open for 2 second and the kid did a really cool butterfly pattern. Let's move on to sparklers. And sparklers are really, really bright. So you don't need to leave the shutter open for very long. And what I really liked about this is she was listening to me very closely. She was really still except for her arm and that was pretty important to the shot since I didn't use a flash. You can see another one of her here turning it around as well as the sparks flying out in a centrifugal fashion. This next shot I turned the flash on again in order to freeze the kid in play and then right when the flash went off, I moved the camera to the right. This is a neat little trick I learned from a friend of mine, Chris Caselli. Right when the flash goes off, then you move the camera away and as a result, you get the streaking across the image. Here's another night when I took my kid out and gave him control of the camera. You'll see me right here in a ghost image. My son left the shutter open for 13 seconds. Flash is on, it captures my image, and then I walk out of the scene and as a result, you see this ghostlike image of me. Here's one of my son. He had a great time taking these pictures because he would find the most complicated place on the playground. We would push the flash, leave the shutter open, and then continue to capture light. He had a real good time. Here's an example of painting with light, it's a really fun exercise with the kids in which you leave the shutter open for a long period of time, this time 13 seconds and he moved the flashlight around throughout the frame. Similarly, we put the headlamp on his head and I asked him to hop to his right, our left, and as he hopped along, I saw this really neat sinusoidal curve start to form. And finally, our favorite shot of the night. We spent a long time working on this shot. My song began off in the distance, in the grass, and for 10 seconds, we left the shutter open. He ran toward this bike rack, ducked underneath it, crawled on his hands and knees and kept crawling in a straight fashion out of frame and it makes it look like a lightning bolt comes and goes through the bike stand. Well that's all this week for Gear Daddy. If you have some pictures you've taken of your kids at night, let me know at info@dadlabs.com so that I can share them over at DadLabs.com. I also just want to give a particular thanks to BabyBjorn for allowing us every week to creatively go out and do stuff with our kids and then come back and tell you all about them here at DadLabs.com.