CNC Light Painting

had_light_pt

Light painting is a technique where a shape is drawn with a light source while a camera is taking a very long exposure shot of it. To do this well by hand would take a lot of skill, so I naturally decided to make my "light art" with a CNC router. Using this technique, the LED light is treated just like an engraving bit would be under normal circumstances. The difference is that the Y axis is … [Read more...]

Paint your pictures, no PC needed

Untitled

LEDs and and cameras always make a fun mixture, and its not all that hard to have quite a bit of fun as well. The Light Painting Stick is similar to other long exposure camera tricks like LightScythe and gets about the same reults. The difference is the Light Painting Stick is self contained meaning you don't have to drag nearly as much stuff along with you to have fun. Hardware used is HL1606 … [Read more...]

Rainbow Machine livens up any photograph

rainbow-machine

[Shameel Arafin, Sean McIntyre, and Reid Bingham] really dig rainbows. Going by the moniker the “RainBroz”, the trio built a portable display that can be used to add cool light painting effects to pictures. The group brings their Rainbow Machine all over the place, including parties, gatherings, and random spots on the street. Anyone is welcome to have their picture taken with the Rainbow … [Read more...]

Light painting Nyan Cat with an Arduino

arduino-light-painting

You too can paint your favorite meme in light with just a few tools. [Skywodd] brought together a couple of different projects to make this happen. He had already built a large POV display and now uses a DSLR with long exposure to create light paintings (translated). The Arduino-powered display is built from a strip of 35 RGB LEDs. Now, that's four pins per LED but one of is ground, leaving … [Read more...]

LED wand for light painting photography

Pacman's revenge

[Michael Ross] is a photographer who has been getting into light painting recently. He's come up with his own RGB light wand to create some amazing images, and also written a very, very thorough tutorial (PDF warning) on how to build your own light wand. The light wand is based on an Arduino Mega board and uses an RGB LED strip based on the HL1606 controller chip. We've covered these LED strips … [Read more...]

Light painting – still shots and animations

light-painting-with-arduino

[Kim Pimmel's] been doing some really interesting light painting with an Arduino. In the past we've seen several light painting projects which use long exposures to capture moving LEDs, or moving LCD displays. But [Kim's] stepping it up a notch, using cold cathode flourescent lamps, electroluminescent (EL) wire, and lasers. The vibrant colors put out by these sources make for some great photos, … [Read more...]

How to find WiFi: carry a big stick and use long exposures

long-exposure-reveals-wifi-networks

Here's an artsy way to map out WiFi networks around you; use a big light pole and long exposures to graph them on top of photographs. This capture method is often called light painting, and uses the relative brightness of LEDs to stretch out a still image - moving the stick quickly while the shutter is open. The four-meter tall rod used in this project plays host to 80 white LEDs. An Arduino … [Read more...]