Painting the Night

Last Autumn I ran a light painting night at a camera club in Lincolnshire. We all took lots of images, and during the course of the session I sadly dropped my Pixelstick tool smack on the hard tarmac of a car park. Bits of plastic and glass exploded around me, and the memory card I was using skated away. Needless to say, it just stopped working – I was a bit upset……..

The colleague and friend whom I was with took it home with him, and effected a temporary repair, and though I knew these things were not being manufactured any more, I was lucky to obtain a replacement from a chap down in Kent.

A friend of mine who lives in Surrey, collected it for me, and duly delivered it up here a few months later.

In the meantime – I realised that though I’d used this tool many times at camera clubs up and down the county, I couldn’t remember when I’d last used it just for me… so with the nights still getting dark fairly early, I decided that I’d get myself a new wireless trigger, and at the very least go and play in the garden.

What the tool is, is a set of 200 LED lights arranged in a long stick. You are able to programme the lights to play in a set order, so that when the stick is moved in front of the camera, they play very much in the same way you would print a picture – one line at a time. The camera sensor sees the pattern or picture that you programme into the machine via an SD card. It’s clever technology.

Sadly the company that made them, seems to have vanished. The website is still there, but it’s not been updated for years.

We have been practicing in the back garden now for a week or so. Previously of course work has been done in clubrooms, or (disastrously) in a car park. So here I am, back in the garden trying to renew my acquaintance with the Pixelstick.

Fingers crossed we can get out some more in the coming weeks. Creating images to use takes some time, as images have to be a certain orientation, size and converted to BMP. Not a long process, but finding the right things turns out to be a bit tricky.

Just need to find the right location now….