lightpainting

"HoloPainting" is a newly invented technique that combines light painting, stop motion, and hyperlapse to create animated, 3D holograms consisting of pure light.

At the beginning of this year, I started the photography trip of a lifetime, planning to travel to all 7 continents in a single trip. Currently I’m at Siargao in the Philippines, a paradise location surrounded by beautiful white sand islands.

We just found out about a really neat piece of software for Canon DSLRs. Called LooZ, it lets you see and record what you're light painting as you light paint it, taking the guesswork out of complex light painting creations and letting you share the final process in video form.

In this post, I'll be sharing how I shoot light painting photos using a 4-foot fluorescent tube protector. The technique is quite simple and can lead to very interesting results.

One of my favourite places to light paint is inside tunnels, waterways and other curved structures. These structures are perfect for creating spirograph light paintings.

What do you think of when you hear the words "light painting"? Colorful and squiggly lines over a dark background? An explosion of glowing sparks?

Did you know that you can also add photo-realistic images to your long-exposure photos by painting them in with light?

For the Adobe MAX 2015 conference in Los Angeles back in October 2015, Adobe invited photographer Eric Paré to create a 360-degree light painting photo booth for attendees to experience.

An iconic shipwrecked fishing boat in Point Reyes, California, was severely damaged by a fire yesterday, and it may have been caused by a photographer's long-exposure light-painting photo involving sparks from burning steel wool.

Here's a short 2-minute feature by Great Big Story about the life and work of photographer Steven Erra, who isn't allowing his loss of vision and eventual blindness get in the way of his light painting photo work.

German drone manufacturer Ascending Technologies is celebrating Christmas season this year by doing some light painting photography. Each of the photos they've made was painted by an automated drone that was programmed to follow waypoints in the sky.

The company believes this is the first drone light painting project of this kind.

This past May, photographer Grant Mallory and his girlfriend Maria celebrated Maria's college graduation by embarking on an epic road trip around the United States. Mallory wanted to capture each National Park's scenic locations in a unique way, so he brought along an LED hula hoop and had Maria pose for light painting portraits.

A spirograph is a geometric drawing toy that produces beautiful mathematical curves by rolling a smaller circle inside a bigger circle. You can create similar patterns using light painting.

Since 1987, the School of Photographic Arts & Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has done an annual nighttime community photo project called RIT Big Shot. For the the 31st event held this past weekend on October 3rd, the school set out to create a photo of the Churchhill Downs that shows the iconic Kentucky Derby track at night.

How do you go about lighting a giant racetrack at night? Well, RIT enlisted the help of 1,800 volunteers to help light paint the scene. All external lighting was provided by the volunteers using flashlights, electronic flash units, and some high-end strobes.

"Impermanent Sculptures" is a series of light-painting photos by Brazilian photographer Vitor Schietti. One of the interesting ideas found in the series is using fireworks to illuminate trees, resulting in photos that look like the leaves and branches are showering drops of light onto the ground.

What happens when you combine the art of light painting with fifty Olympus OM-D E-M10 mirrorless cameras? The team at ZOLAQ in Germany wanted to know just that. Teaming up with Olympus and design agency ‘Bird Like’, the team created the 2-minute video above, titled ‘Bullet Time’.

Want a light stick for light painting but don't want to spend a lot buying a commercial product? Light painting photographer Eric Pare recently discovered a cheap and easy solution: tube guards (also known as lamp guards).

How do you go about capturing music in a photograph? Photographer Stephen Orlando has an interesting answer: light painting. By attaching LED lights to the bows of violin, viola, and cello players, Orlando is able to capture a creative representation of the sounds created by musicians.

Light-painting photographer Darren Pearson released this 3.5-minute video tutorial on how to paint …

Believe it or not, the image above isn't a digital composite created in Photoshop -- it's a light painting photo captured using a film camera. Photographer Jason D. Page spent four years planning for this shot before finally capturing it in just the right conditions recently.

Steel wool is often done by lighting a small ball of steel wool on fire and then swinging it around in a long exposure photo while it burns. But what happens when you take it to the extreme? The folks over at Joby recently decided to see what you get when you burn a giant 2-foot ball of burning steel wool.

Photographer Keow Wee Loong of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, just got his hands on the new Huawei P8 smartphone, which has an innovative "Light Painting" feature that stacks multiple images to create single long-exposure photos.

To test the feature out, Loong shot a series of 6-7 minute exposures while light painting a model. These are the resulting unedited photos that were taken straight out of the smartphone.

Photographer Eric Paré has built much of his career around the concept of light painting, but a recent photo shoot he did involved a very different source of lighting: the bioluminescence of glowing plankton.

Photographer Calder Wilson recently did some experimentation by attaching fireworks to a drone and then flying it around in a long exposure photograph. The results are beautiful to look at.

Here’s a fun and very easy way to do professional product photography light painting using your iPhone, or any other phone or tablet for that matter. The bigger the screen the better the results, but a standard phone screen will absolutely do the job.

This tutorial uses the light painting technique. Rather than the typical light painting technique where the light is used as the subject to draw out words or simple pictures; this technique uses light painting to light, highlight, and backlight the your subject. This will give you studio quality professional product photos worthy of any usage.

Did you know that there's a Guinness World Record for the most light orbs painted into a single long-exposure photograph? The record was most recently broken by a group of 12 notable light painting photographers who gathered together in the middle of last year to create a photo featuring 200 light orbs.

Light painting photographer Darren Pearson spent the past year working on the stop motion animation above, titled "Lightspeed." Each of the 1,000 frames in it is a separate light-painted photograph that was captured in various locations across California.

For a new marketing campaign titled "Inspired Light," Infiniti invited Canadian professional light painting photographer Patrick Rochon to Dubai to transform three of its cars into "moving light painting brushes."

Using light painting to capture the smooth motions of athletes, especially water-based athletes, is not new. You might remember these light painting wake boarding photos by Patrick Rochon, for example.

But photographer Stephen Orlando's images of Kayaking, Canoeing and Swimming remove one of the central parts of these images: the athletes. What remains are the simple, captivating paths of light left by the paddle or arm as it slices through the water, propelling its owner.

…And we’re back! After a much-needed summer hiatus, it’s that time of the year again when my comrades in the SNL Film Unit all reconvene on the 17th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza for another season of filmmaking speed-drills.

Product photography -- even when done with cheap gear like this awesome tutorial using an iPhone, an IKEA lamp and some flashlights -- usually involves multiple light sources. But there is a way around that, as Laya Gerlock over on DIY Photography demonstrates in this awesome tutorial titled "How to Shoot a Perfect Watch with Nothing but an iPad."

For the Adobe Remix project, talented light painting artist Janne Parviainen painstakingly combined forced perspective drawing with light painting to create something really special.

Photographer Jason D. Page has been capturing light painting photography for years, and over the past 3 years he has also been working on a new project for the light painting community. It's called Light Painting Brushes.

Just launched today, Light Painting Brushes is a set of light tools that aims to give lightpainters a standard set of brushes to "paint" with.

Lovers of light painting photography, large format photography, symmetry and physics each have a distinct reason to enjoy photographer Paul Wainwright's Pendulum Project.

Created in the pitch blackness of his barn at night, Wainwright shoots these beautiful light paintings with the help of a massive Blackburn pendulum he built himself and a large format camera packing 4x5 sheet film.

We’ve featured the incredible visual effects work of Joey Shanks of Shanks FX before when he created homemade holograms . And today we’re back with yet another piece that celebrates the 30th anniversary of the 1984 film Ghostbusters: remaking the iconic proton streams using a clever light-painting technique.

As light painting photography is becoming more popular and common, photographers are coming up with better and better ways of bringing the technique to events. The Lightomatic is a fancy solution by Dazler, a collective of light painters based out of Lyon, France.

From the outside it looks like your average high-end photo booth, but it's one that allows users to make a creative light painting self-portrait print on the spot.

A clever new project called Location-Based Light Painting is putting a new spin on visualizing the number and specific location of photos taken in any particular spot.

Using a custom-built iPhone app, a speedlight, long exposure photography and geolocation data readily available online, the project literally 'paints' each location into a separate photo to create haunting orb-covered landscapes.

Author’s note: The below video contains no explicit nudity, but may still be considered NSFW by some -- proceed with caution.

If you’re looking to spice up your portraiture a bit, Smoking Strobes has a neat little trick that you should try out if you don't already have it in your repertoire. It’s done using speedlights, although probably not in the way you normally use them.

Rather than the speedlight being on-camera or triggered through a set of wireless triggers, this method of lighting a subject is done by ‘flash painting’ one pop of the flash at a time.