Pixelstick – Photographic Musings……… Or

Three is the Number!

Three is the magic number – or so the song would have us believe. It’s one of only 9 single digits (discounting 0) – but is it a designers dream? Does it drive photography, design and literature?

I ask myself sometimes why is two of anything boring, but three much more fun?

When people see two things written together, you can usually see a connection – for example solid and liquid, left and right, up and down. (See I used three examples there – so much more comfortable to read eh?)

Even if there isn’t an immediate connection we can find something that links them – Pride and Prejudice; Death in Venice; Heart of Darkness (three examples again)… so even if we can’t find a connection in the words, our brain fills in the relevant gaps. Think big and small, one is dominant, and one isn’t.

You can always, ALWAYS, connect two dots with a straight line….. not so with three, not always.

Add another word and it becomes in English Language a Tricolon.

(A series of three words, phrases or sentences that are parallel in structure, length and/or rhythm.)

It can be a good device for humour… for example “Three ……… walk into a bar”. Two elements get you going in one direction, but the third introduces something unexpected.

Think of these “Wine, Women and Song”, “Veni Vidi, Vici”, “Eat Drink and be Merry”.

With a tricolon you can set up a pattern and then break it… ‘Lies, damned lies, and statistics’ is a good example. Two words send you in one direction, and the third breaks it.

Of course, that’s not always the case… in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, there’s the great question about ‘Life, the Universe, and Everything’. You can’t stop half way through, there’s no meaning. Two is company, three is a list….. (and the answer of course is always 42!)

And that’s the important bit, the ‘good, bad and ugly’ of it all, we’ll just have to ‘eat, drink and be merry’.

This whole sense of it is its completeness, an end to a list, a finish. We’ve said it all, or we’ve photographed it all, and in the end analysis, three, just works…….

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….

Light Painting Talks

Just recently there seems to have been an increase in requests for us to do various demonstrations of light painting at camera clubs.

The latest of these was held at R B Camera Club near Nettleham, Lincolnshire. We turned up – to be received by a good number of enthusiastic photographers who were willing to stand out in the cold, and alternately work indoors.

We took the Spirojib with us, and the Pixelstick, and mixed in finger lights, torches, and lasers.

I’ve been given permission to post a few of the images taken that night by some of the members….. thank you so much Bryan Hurt, and Phil Blakelock of R B – good to see some creative use of the images too…….

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Bookings are coming in fairly quickly now…… so if your club would like a demonstration, and take some photos please get in touch.

The Pixelstick

I think that unless you have not had anything to do with lightpainting – you will have heard of the Pixelstick.

In case you haven’t, the Pixelstick received over 6 times it’s kickstarter funding goal in 2013. I got hold of one in early 2015, and though I’ve taken it out to various camera clubs, and demonstrated just what can be done with it, I have to confess, that I’ve not used it myself really very much in anger.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the Pixelstick is an array of 200 addressable RGB LEDs. This means each LED can produce almost any colour, and each one can be instructed to flash on and off at a particular speed and colour sequence. With the right set of instructions, the LEDs can be used to mimic the pixels of a bitmapped image, so as the Pixelstick is moved through space, the LEDs effectively ‘draw’ the bitmap in midair and can be captured during a long exposure photograph. It works a bit like an ink jet printer. As you see a print coming out, one line of ink at a time, so the Pixelstick works in much the same way, but with light. BMP files are saved to an SD card which sits in the control panel, and allows you to replay any image saved on there in the correct format.

The camera stays still, and as you move the lights along in front of the sensor, the colours are captured line by line, making up an image, or pattern.

The website is HERE if you want more information…….

DS2_1995

It’s possible to add more than one image to overlay another, making up complex pictures.

There’s a group of lightpainters who really don’t like this kind of equipment – they much prefer to have all their lightpainting done with different techniques and self made equipment.

Personally though, I have not got the time, inclination, know-how, to make some of the things they use – and so I use this rather wonderful Pixelstick instead.

DV7B1152 Combine it with people, and you can make amazing silhouettes – and portraiture works well too, as you can make what ever kind of background you like.