@zincsaucier442 Beautiful stuff - love the blues/reds! Here's some of my new/mixed with old toys - Bigger pics on my Flickr...
man, I just shoot all mine last minute/on the fly. What I found to work best for me is (for those using SLR cameras) is to bathe the vinyl with the camera's flash a few times, in the dark, before taking your shot. The flash bulb is a really heavy charger, and works both stronger, and quicker (basically immediate) than any other source of light I have at my disposal. There should be a button on your SLR for "flash testing" or whatever you want to call it, just hit the toy from a few different angles without actually snapping pics & you're done. Step by step for me is: place the toy, place the camera, dial in aperture/exposure, auto focus w/lights on, change to manual focus, lights off, flash-charge toy, snap pics. Oh, and always shoot with really low ISO - or else you end up with a non-black background, and grainy noise all over nice - GID & black blanks of each of those 3 is sweet
black lights are good, but cfl bulbs are fine too (and actually useful for lighting things). my overhead light fixture uses a cfl bulb and after having it on for just a few minutes the glow guys are pretty well charged.
Wow! Amazing stuff zincs and smo9. Thanks zincs for the tips. Tried out some. PK's Monster Parade is blacklit, not GID though.
These are the translucent blue-green ones. The color seems to let just enough light in to charge the BBs and just enough glow out to look cool.