Want to illuminate an entire football field for a photo shoot, but can’t find enough friends who will let you borrow their external flashes? Have deep pockets? Here’s a “lighting accessory” you might want to add to your camera bag: the light truck.
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Based in San Francisco, Kim Pimmel is a photographer, a user interface designer, a DJ, and a “maker.” Take a look at his experimental light painting photographs, and you’ll see each of these interests shining through. Pimmel has spent years experimenting with long exposure photographs that show different light sources as brushes. His beautiful images are created using custom rigs and common objects — things like turntables, ping pong balls, fiber optic cables, pendulums, iPhone screens, and more.
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3D light painting can be done by using a 2D image rather than a single point of light. In the past, we’ve shared creative examples of iPads being used in this way to light paint everything from ghostly figures to creative animations.

The video above, created for the recent launch of McLaren’s new P12 super car, takes this screen-based 3D light painting concept to the next level.
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London-based photographer Tony Ellwood has a project called In No Time that deals with our perception and awareness of our passage of time. All the photographs are of the same pier on a beach that Ellwood visited over a period of six months. His technique, which took him 18 months to develop and perfect, involves visiting the location multiple times for each photo — sometimes up to three times a day for multiple days. Using a 4×5 large format camera, Ellwood creates each exposure across multiple sessions, as if he were doing multiple exposure photography, but of a single subject and scene. Each exposure time ranges from a few seconds to multiple hours.
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This fascinating TED talk was given last month by MIT researcher Ramesh Raskar on his femto-photography camera that snaps images at a whopping one trillion frames per second — a rate so fast that it can capture light in motion. The technology may one day be used to build cameras that shoot around corners or see into the human body without X-rays.

Photographer Rick Giles‘ project Light features abstract long-exposure shots of light pouring in through the door of a barn. He tells us,

The shots were created in camera by moving the camera across the surface of where the light is penetrating the barn. This draws the light in, and depending on the movement of the camera, creates shapes on the dark interior of the barn. Sometimes in quite abstract formations breaking the light down into the hues of the season. Other times mirroring the complete landscape of the exterior onto the interior wall.

It’s awesome how the colors in the light offer a hint of what’s on the other side of the door.
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Montreal-based photographer Benoit Paillé‘s Alternative Landscapes project features photos of various outdoor locations lit with a glowing square. The images aren’t Photoshopped: Paillé actually suspends a 1×1 meter cube for the beautiful illumination seen in his images.
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Flickr user TigTab creates beautiful scenes by light painting with hand-cut stencils. For each shot, the camera’s shutter is left open while she moves about the location, firing her flash through the stencils in various locations to add the individual items to the scene. Some photographs take up to four hours to create from start to finish.
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Here’s a 10 minute photography lesson by Karl Taylor on the four main types of light: transmitted, reflected, soft, and hard. Understanding these concepts can revolutionize the way you see and shoot scenes.

(via Silber Studios)

London-based advertising and art photographer Atton Conrad does some pretty interesting mixing of fashion and light painting photography. He has done a number of images for magazines and ad campaigns that feature models wearing dresses manufactured from light rather than fabric. For each fo the images, Conrad paints the dress around the model in a blacked-out studio while remotely triggering the camera.
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