Pixelstick Takes Light Painting to a New Level

Mike Rankin

Have you ever tried light painting by moving a light source around while you take a long exposure photo?

The results can be very cool, but also very unpredictable and limited. But a small Brooklyn-based group called Bitbanger Labs has developed a device called the Pixelstick that promises to take light painting to a new level.

Here’s the official description of the device:

Pixelstick consists of 198 full color RGB LEDs inside a lightweight aluminum housing. Pixelstick’s brain, a small mounted box, reads images from an SD card and displays them, one line at a time. Each LED corresponds to a single pixel in the image. The images themselves can be from 1 to 198 pixels tall and many thousands of pixels wide. The handle is perpendicular and has a secondary aluminum sleeve, allowing pixelstick to spin freely. Pixelstick uses 8 AA batteries. 

And Pixelstick is not limited to painting with a single color of light. You can load digital images onto the pixelstick via an SD card and project them into your photos.

And with multiple exposures, you can create animations (click the image below to view the animation).

To see what you can do with a Pixelstick check out the video below.