lights

A person using a smartphone to photograph a haunted house scene with two eerie figures in a dimly lit, blue-toned room. the photo features a prominent "petapixel showcase" watermark.

ProMaster’s Light Attendant App Takes the Guesswork Out of Lighting

Lighting on cinematic photo or video production sets can sometimes be an overwhelming experience. While lighting companies continue to improve both the ease of use and quality of the light lights, mastering and adjusting the setups can take a lot of time, effectively slowing production to a halt when changes need to be made. Thankfully, creatives that leverage the power and simplicity of the ProMaster Light Attendant App can quickly and easily master all of their on-set lighting needs.

SmallRig-RC220B-Review

SmallRig RC 220 Bi-Color LED Review: Accurate and Affordable

SmallRig's 220 Watt RC 220B LED light is a much-anticipated update to the RC120 series LED. While the D version is daylight balanced, the B model we tested offers a color balance of 2700K to 6500K. After making several smaller vlogger-style LED lights, it seems with this update, SmallRig is officially entering the professional continuous lighting world.

Learn 21 One-Light Portrait Setups In Less Than Six Minutes

Sometimes photographers may be in a situation where they only have a single light source at their disposal during a portrait session. The good news is there are many ways you can use a single light to create unique and dramatic looks for portrait work as Dima Metkin demonstrates.

Quick Tip: How to Take Holiday Photos with LED Christmas Lights

It's the holiday season and everyone's favorite photography background prop is Christmas lights. It used to be pretty easy to get these photos to come out perfect, but with the rise in popularity of LED lights, there's some weird stuff that happens if you don't have the right camera settings.

A Simple, Consistent, Dramatic One-Light Portrait Setup

If you're looking for a simple lighting setup for dramatic portraits, look no further. Photographer Aaron Anderson has put together a lighting tutorial that will show you how he uses one light, a black flag, and a white card to capture beautiful, dramatic headshots.

How to Build Your Own Set of LED Studio Lights for Just $250

Buying a professional portrait lighting setup like the much-loved Kino Flo lights is just not within everybody's budget, especially if you want LEDs. But you can actually build a reasonable alternative for just a couple hundred bucks and about an hour of manual labor.

This Precision Drone Navigation System is Great for Light Painting Photos

PRENAV is a company aimed at developing extremely sophisticated automation systems for small aerial drones. Recently, the company announced that they had acquired $1.2 million to help make their drone technology smarter. So, what better to do with a bit of the seed money than fly drones around, create precise light patterns for light painting, and photograph them?

Elinchrom’s New Litemotiv Softboxes Have 16 Sides

Elinchom have just announced the Litemotiv, a new extension to their lineup of softboxes. The two new modifiers are made up of sixteen sides and come in two distinct sizes. According to the company, theses monster softboxes help to create “close to perfect catchlights.”

Aerial Photographs of London Glowing at Night

After photographing a number of US cities at night through the open door of a helicopter, photographer Vincent Laforet has taken his Air project across the pond to shoot aerial shots of European cities. His first stop: London.

Stacked Star Trail Time-Lapse Created with Photos Shot from Space

We're shared a couple of "stacked star trail" time-lapse videos over the past few months (see here and here), but those videos comprised nighttime photographs taken from the ground. Photographer Christoph Malin recently decided to try his hand at the technique, but instead of using his own earthbound photographs, he used NASA photographs shot from the International Space Station. The resulting video, shown above, features the stars drawing trails across the "sky" while the Earth creates light streaks down below.

The Light Show on CN Tower is Actually a Subliminal Photo Slideshow

If you've visited the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada anytime during the past five years at night, you've likely enjoyed the dazzling light show that appears on the side of the tower. The 1,330 uber-bright LED lights (which cost a cool $2.5 million) were installed in the elevator shafts back in 2007, and are turned on from dusk every day until 2 the next morning. What you might not have known, however, is that the seemingly random colors that appear are really not so random after all: they're actually pieces of photographs!

Repurpose Empty Film Roll Canisters as Invitation Holders

If you've got spent, empty film cassettes lying around collecting dust, Photojojo has a crafty idea for the mindful re-user: make them into rolled invitation or stationery holders.

It's quite simple: cut and decorate 1.375″ x 11″ strip of paper, pop the top off the film cassette (you can use a bottle opener) and tape the inside end of the strip to the film spool. Wind the paper into the cassette and leave a tab for the recipient to unfurl the message.

Starry Night Photographs of Landscapes Covered in Lights

Korean photographer Lee Eunyeol creates beautiful nighttime scenes by installing lights in various landscapes. His artist statement reads,

Starry night expresses private spaces given by night and various emotions that are not able to be defined and described in the space. I’ve chosen analogue type for the expression which attempts to install electric bulbs in an objet to be expressed using back space of night by taking advantage of huge studio. There are two spaces in photographs. One is a space before electric bulbs of familiar landscape are installed and the other is a space after electric bulbs expressed by dispersing personal emotion are installed. Unified light from these two spaces generates a mysterious landscape.

In each of his photos, it almost looks as if the stars have fallen from the sky onto the ground.

Jaw-Dropping Time-Lapse Shots of Earth

Between August and October of this year, the crew onboard the International Space Station used a Nikon D3S (at high ISOs) to capture photographs of Earth as they zipped around it at 17,000mph. Michael Konig then took the footage and compiled it into this eye-popping time-lapse video showing what our planet looks like from up there.