This article was taken from the February 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
To create a light painting, you swirl your light source around in front of a camera and hope for the best. But Brooklyn-based photographers Duncan Frazier and Steve McGuigan wanted to pre-design light paintings before creating them -- so they made the Pixelstick. "It's a 1.8-metre long aluminium bar with 198 RGB LEDs lining the front side, each LED representing a pixel," Frazier explains. "You create a bitmap image in Photoshop and put it on an SD card which connects to the back of the Pixelstick. Then you take a 10-or 15-second-long photograph as you walk through the camera frame, waving the stick." The Pixelstick's LEDs cycle through your bitmap in columns, for a tenth of a second each -- long-exposure photography reveals the full picture; multiple images in succession lets you create animated Gifs.
The duo launched a Kickstarter campaign, raising $500,000 (£300,00) as of November, and aim to ship the $300 (£182)
Pixelstick in May. "We want to put it in the hands of the average photographer," says McGuigan.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
