Mermaid Swim & Photo Shoot in Mexico with Mermaid Glimmer

Mermaid Glimmer, Photo by Robert Minnick

I'm finally getting caught up with life after 5 days in Mexico with the Mermaid Portfolio Workshop followed by a crazy-busy weekend -- I came home and jumped into 3 fire shows, 3 Frozen Elsa shows, and a Tinkerbell show over the next 3 days.

Monday?  I slept on Monday.  Isn't that what Mondays are for?

I landed in Mexico with Mermaid Atlantis, the last two to join the trip.  It was a 3-segment workshop, starting with a whale shark swim and a trip to Cancun's underwater museum.  (I did this part last year and have a crazy cool video).

A new addition this year was 3 days of shooting in the Mexican Cenotes, in Playa del Carmen.  Cenotes are freshwater swimming holes -- basically sinkholes created by slow-moving underground rivers.  They're frequented by scuba divers looking to do some freshwater cave diving, and by photographers attracted by the unique combination of clear water, rocky cave-like overhangs, and jungle vines bathed in sunlight.

This was the ideal location to shoot the Glimmer Mermaid tail.  With its array of LEDs flashing in rainbow colors, the darkness of the caves really allowed it to (ahem) shine.

Photo by Susan Knight Studios

We had 3 photographers and 8 mermaids from all over the US and Canada.  I brought my Ariel Swimming Mermaid tail also, and during the sunnier portions of the shooting days I got some pretty Ariel shots.  We managed to squeeze in some fairy photos too, and fairy-mermaid combo shots, which I can't wait to see.  But in the early mornings and late afternoons I focused mostly on Glimmer.

Making an underwater LED mermaid tail may be the biggest folly I've ever undertaken.  She breaks all the time.  She's finicky and capricious, prone to mood swings, and downright dangerous if I treat her wrong.  (I have a 12v LiPo battery strapped between my ankles underwater, and these are known to explode if gotten wet or punctured).  She's complicated and magical and tricksy and sometimes a downright bitch.  She frustrates me, burns me, takes all my money, and drives me to tears.

Mermaid Atlantis, Photo by Robert Minnick

But my god, the beauty she creates deep in those underwater caves as she glows and shimmers and shifts through her rainbow colors..  she fills my heart with beauty, pride, and love.  I wouldn't trade her for anything.


I am slowly seeing some of the images taken by our fabulous photographers as they post their favorites on Facebook.  Each new image of me or of one of my mermaid sisters along on the trip gets me so excited.  It's like Christmas!  I'm doing my best to keep from madly refreshing the page every 20 seconds all day every day.

Photo by Susan Knight Studios

We also got a lot of amazing video footage, so I'll be coming out with a Mermaid Glimmer video sometime soon.  Watch for it over on my YouTube channel.

Glimmer held up pretty well on this trip.  I wore her for 2 full days in some pretty rough terrain, and took her pretty deep, before anything broke on her.  After the 3rd day she did need some repairs, but the repair process is getting easier and she's already 100% back online.  I now have confidence that she is ready for the public.  Of course,  I want to add more animation modes, more bells & whistles and more sensors and interactivity, but I'm ready to start booking her for evening pool appearances with confidence.

As the summer wanes and the warm autumn nights unfold, don't you need a glowing mermaid in your pool?  :)

Mermaid Glimmer, Photo by Robert Minnick

Glimmer the LED Mermaid 2.0

Glimmer 2.0 all golden and gleaming

This year has been all about mermaids.

I'm going on Bob and Malena's Mermaid Portfolio Workshop to Centoes in Mexico in just a couple weeks, and I'm working day and night to be sure my LED tail is finished and robust enough to handle international travel and a week of ocean swimming.

Glimmer's new detailing

Glimmer 1.0 was gorgeous.  She was also incredibly heavy, and incredibly delicate and sensitive.  I spent months on development and fabrication and probably even more time on repairs -- it seemed like every time I'd take her off the rack, another light strand would break, which meant another hour of frustration, soldering, gluing, and cursing.   She survived through just two public appearances and about 3 photo shoots before I was ready to chuck the whole tail in the bin.

But cooler heads prevailed, as they will, and I've spent the last month or so cutting her down and rethinking my light strategies and design ideas.  Glimmer 2.0 is lighter, sleeker, and much more robust.  There are fewer lights, but I think the new placement has a lot of impact, and I'm super happy with the finishing details.  She's got jewels and lace just everywhere, and many more sparkles.  What's not to love?

((Warning: geeky bit ahead))

The LEDs are laid out in a matrix pattern (basically a grid) instead of lots of parallel lines.  This basically means the code I was running on Glimmer 1.0 is more or less useless.  Code that looks good on a bunch of parallel strips just doesn't work when it's snaking down one long serpentine pattern, so I had to start pretty much from scratch for the animations.  In doing this, I realize that I have completely leveled UP when it comes to programming in Arduino.

For Glimmer 2.0, I knew what I wanted and was able to figure out how to make it happen.  I am so proud of me, and so grateful to the Fast LED community for  being so helpful and supportive, and for writing such great Arduino libraries.  (srsly, I just discovered a function called "add_glitter()".. if that's not the library for Glimmer, I don't know what is).

My stumbling block now is Android.  I'm using different code and different LEDs and my Android contol app doesn't work worth beans anymore.  It crashes the whole tail pretty regularly.  Grr.  I've been banging on it for 2 days now and getting nowhere, but I do have confidence that I'll at least have something working by the time I leave for Mexico on the 19th.

((ok, geek/off))

So I will have some new photos and video of the new tail soon!  For now, here are a few pics from last year's Mermaid Portfolio Workshop to get you excited.  They certainly get me excited!

First Swim in the LED Mermaid Tail

Making a waterproof LED mermaid tail is ridiculously hard.  What kind of crazy person would even attempt something like that?  

I did my first swim in the tail on Friday night at a friend's house.  I'd tested the tail in the bathtub and fixed any leaks or short circuits I could find, but electricity is sneaky, leaky stuff. I was pretty terrified before that first true swim test -- to the point where I was waking up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, in a cold sweat.  Would I electrocute myself?  Would I electrocute anyone else in the pool with me?  Would the LEDs work?  Would they all just flicker once and then go out?  Was this just a very expensive and time-consuming fruitless dream?

Finally the time came and I headed over to the pool.  After some pretty poolside photos, I slowly and nervously dipped my fins into the pool, and watched as the lights sank gently below the surface.  They calmly twinkled up at me, so I smiled and slipped the rest of the way into the water, kicking gently at first, then with a little more force as the LEDs continued to glimmer on the walls of the pool.

First impression?  This tail swims REALLY WELL.  The competitor monofin and thinner gauge neoprene I used created a juuuust slightly positive buoyancy tail.  That means that in the water I'm nearly weightless, and just a little bit floaty.  I am delighted with this.  My "Ariel" swimming tail is very buoyant -- so much that it's difficult to swim in.  Glimmer's tail is perfect.

I swam back and forth, grinning like an idiot, for about 10 minutes.  After the water started to soak in a bit, I started noticing a few flickers here and there, but overall I was really impressed with the water resistance of the tail.  Once it dries out completely, I hope I'll be able to find the leak points pretty easily and add some more waterproofing.

I didn't get a chance to work on it this weekend -- too many Elsa Princess parties on Saturday, and then I had a photo shoot scheduled with The Mermaid Atlantis and Lance Miller down in Santa Cruz for Sunday evening, so I didn't want to open it up and mess with it.

The photos Lance took are still trickling in, but I'm really happy with how they turned out.   Good thing too -- right after we got the tail's lights set up, the ocean swelled up and swallowed my Nexus 7 tablet.  The tablet is how I control the tail (via bluetooth), so at least we'd had a chance to set the tail on rainbow mode before we lost it for good.

The ocean waves seemed to be a bit rougher on Glimmer than gently swimming back and forth in the pool.  I'm a little disheartened at how much work I'm going to need to do to get her working again.  But I'm pretty delighted with this:

I'll post more pics as I get them on G+ / Picasa or on Glimmer's Facebook Page.  Enjoy!