Painting with Light

by rexikan | December 15, 2013 | (10) Posted in Challenges

The winter is long and dark in Sweden. Fortunately, LED lights has evolved quite a bit in recent years, and for a few dollars you can get very good lighting on your or multirotor. Not only can you easily see the orientation of the craft in the dark, the leds are also strong enough to light the environment.

Leds are available in different colors, but I have chosen to have strong white light in the front and red on the tail of my homebuilt tricopter.

When I started flying in the dark, I got to wonder how it would look on a long exposure photo. As it turned out, you can really see the flight path through the air. On closeups you can see each LED as a separate path, and with them lined up it gives a nice futuristic effect.

Then I realized that I really got a light pencil in my hands which I could use to draw different figures. As I can't see track when I'm flying, I have to imagine the final picture in my head.

If you add some more advanced flying like loops, you can draw really strange things. It would even be possible to have different colors that you can turn on and off during flight, and then you could draw any picture you want if your flying is good enough!

I challange you to draw amazing things and post them to this thread at the Flitetest forum!

COMMENTS

aldalo on December 30, 2013
How do you take a long exposure ?
(My wife has a dslr camera)
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zev on December 30, 2013
set it to shutter priority, and make the exposure 5 seconds or more.

done!
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rexikan on December 30, 2013
For this kind of pictures I use manual mode. First I set the shutter to 20 or 30 seconds, and then I adjust the aperture to get enough light on the background. A good thing with digital cameras is that you can try as much as you want, and that you can see the results right away!
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zev on December 28, 2013
AAWWEESSOOMMEE!!!
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Iron Butterfly on December 28, 2013
Fricking amazing !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
MUST HAVE IT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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AIR_MODEL on December 31, 2013
nice!
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kansasvmax94 on December 31, 2013
Here's a thread of pictures I started. If it needs moved please do so. http://forum.flitetest.com/showthread.php?6884-Painting-with-light-night-shots&p=77845#post77845

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rexikan on December 31, 2013
Very nice and good initiative! I will add the link to the bottom of the article.
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kansasvmax94 on December 30, 2013
You must use a tripod or some sort of stationary place for your camera (even sitting it on a table or something will work). Just play with your shutter speed and ISO. Shutter speed is how long your camera opens its shutter (basically it's eye) and the ISO is how sensitive the sensor. If the image is to dark, bump the ISO up from a stop. Each stop is double the sensitivity, or in essence, double the light. Each stop is 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200. The higher you go the lower the quality of the image though, it will be more grainy.

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kansasvmax94 on December 30, 2013
Where should we post our photos?

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Painting with Light