Photography: light graffiti, macro, HDR

I took last weekend off from programming and computers and went to shoot some photos. There are many techniques I'm interested in but hadn't tried my hand in them or previous attempts were poor at best. These include:

• light graffiti,
• macro photography,
• HDR.

I had also this very plan to take some night photos as described here but unfortunately weather conditions stopped me from doing this (it was rainy, cloudy and dull).
Light graffiti
Light graffiti is an interesting technique. What has to be done is to go into some dark room (or shoot during night) and stand in front of the camera dressed in black (to prevent being caught in the picture). We set long exposure time (several seconds should do), low aperture and ISO around 100. Then we take a torch (the weaker, the better - we will have more time to paint) and start drawing... We can paint or write whatever we want. Here is my signature done this way (it's my name for those who don't know this :) ):

If there was some background, it would be more appealing but I decided to give up idea of adding stars in the background due to the conditions I already mentioned. Even though this text is 2-dimensional there is no restriction of drawing in 3D (all those fancy ribbons and stuff like that).
The only thing to bear in mind is that the result will be flipped as in the mirror. There are two solutions: either to draw in a "flipped mode" or do it afterwards in GIMP or Photoshop. The first one might sound difficult at first but it took me only several minutes to do it this way :)
Macro photography
For the very next day rainy conditions were forecasted. I was quite nervous and excited about that as I knew it would guarantee great macro photography opportunities. The rain came and when it stopped showering I went for a 3hrs photo session with spiders, snails and droplets. Here are the results as a Picasa slideshow:

I used +10 dioptres lens but now it's probably high time to equip myself in a more 'professional' macro lens. Shooting macro is pretty cool. It's almost unbelievable how many details we miss of this small world.
HDR
In HDR I tried my hand before but this time the results are significantly better I think:

I used auto bracketing mechanism - camera changes exposure settings between shooting photos. Then these photos have to be combined together using dedicated software. Some of the photos were taken from a tripod and some from hand. Of course I know they are a bit unnatural but after watching several HDR photos on the web I came to a conclusion that hardly anyone tries to achieve realistic effects using this technique.