This light painting photograph was created by a group of students over in Germany using a swarm of seven Roomba automated vacuum cleaners. Each one had a different colored LED light attached to the top, making the resulting photo look like some kind of robotic Jackson Pollock painting. There’s actually an entire Flickr group dedicated to using Roombas for light painting — check it out of you have one of these robot minions serving you in your home. Read more…
Flickr user Robert Hodgin purchased a cheap RC helicopter and shot these 30 second exposure photographs of him attempting to keep the helicopter from crashing. If you have RC helicopter skills, you might be able to create pretty neat light-painting photographs using this idea. Read more…
Sit around long enough near an airport and you can shoot photos like these — stacked long-exposure images that make airplanes look like fireflies streaking around the night sky. Flickr user Terence Chang visits various locations around the Bay Area to capture these photographs of San Francisco International Airport. Read more…
Runners in broad daylight aren’t often captured as motion blurs, but that’s exactly how Flickr user Justin (just big feet) shot the London Marathon. Just stick a neutral density filter or two onto your lens to restrict the amount of light entering your camera, allowing you to shoot at slower shutter speeds. Read more…
Photographer Denis Smith creates photos giant balls of light without any digital trickery, relying instead on light-painting. His technique is to spin a light around while slowly turning his body, creating spheres of light when seen in a long exposure photo. Read more…
I imagine, almost everyone interested in photography has seen the stunning pictures created with a technique called light painting. You set your camera to long exposure, 20 to 30 seconds or even longer, and use a light source, a flashlight or LED light, to “paint” with it. Most pictures have some kind of magic touch to it because you see only the track of light afterwards and not the actual light source. Light stencils are somewhat related to light painting. It uses the long exposure as well but uses a flash to illuminate a stencil to stamp the motive into the picture. Read more…
After seeing 3D light painting done with an iPad, classmates Jinhwan Kim and Cameron Zotter decided to take the experiment a step further. Instead of simply “painting” in a single direction, they spelled out letters by waving an iPod Touch across six different rows for each long exposure photograph.
If only there was an iPhone app that would allow you to paint any image in the air by simply waving your screen around while the onboard sensors synchronize what’s shown on the screen with the phone’s current position. That would be the bee’s knees.
Here’s one of the most creative examples of light painting and long-exposure photography we’ve seen — a few techie guys built a special 12-foot-long rod with 80 LED lights that light up depending on how strong a particular Wi-Fi signal is. By walking the stick around and capturing the lights in real time, they were able to photograph “light charts” showing how a particular Wi-Fi signal strength fluctuates in a particular area.
Cameras usually hide what it’s shooting from you when the sensor is capturing light, so you can’t watch slow shutter speed photographs as they’re being shot. Magic Shutter is an app for the iPhone that shoots these long exposure using the camera’s video feed, which allows you to see the photograph as its being “developed” on the screen.
Due to limitations Apple places on video resolution, this app currently only spits out low res images (though an update with 1MP photos is coming soon). If you want to play with it you can find it for $3 in the iTunes store.
