Light painting is something that takes a lot of time and patience. Even after many trial and error attempts, nailing the exact look you’re going for can be a challenge. pixelstick is a crazy new tool that aims to change all that, making mind-blowing light paintings something even artistically challenged photographers can create.

A basic description of it is: it’s a stick-like device that lets you print digital images into long exposure photos.



The pixelstick is a long aluminum housing that contains 198 separate full color LED lights. It comes with a separate controller that lets you adjust settings and choose images from an SD card.

On the back of the stick is a second aluminum sleeve that lets you spin the stick on an axis, and on the inside of the main stick is a battery compartment for 8 AA batteries.

Those images are prepared by the user beforehand inside an image editor such as Photoshop. Since each LED light corresponds to one pixel, your images will need to be resized to being 198 pixels tall.

Once the images are loaded into pixelstick, the device displays the image one line of pixels at a time. This means that by waving the stick across the scene in a long-exposure photo, you can “paint” the entire image into the frame.

Do this multiple times in a row, and you can create amazing time-lapse animation sequences.

Here are some sample photographs created using the pixelstick:

Here’s a video that introduces pixelstick and shows off some amazing light painting timelapses created using it:

The team behind pixelstick is currently raising funds for launch over on Kickstarter, where a pledge of $300 will preorder one of these devices.

pixelstick – Light painting evolved [Kickstarter via Colossal]