Future of Photography: Pixelstick

New technology lets one paint with light.

Abigail Ellsworth, Tom Tom Staff

The Pixelstick, a six-foot wand, is a new tool  for photographers to use with their cameras to help create a better light painting. Light painting is a technique that involves moving a light source in front of a camera while it is taking a long exposure. The Pixelstick has energy efficient LEDs so the batteries last for several hours of painting.

This new technology consists of 200 full-color RGB LEDs inside a lightweight aluminum housing. The mounted controller reads images from an SD card and displays them on the LEDs. Each LED corresponds to a pixel in the image. Mounted on the side of the Pixelstick is a controller that tells all the LEDs when to flash a pixel in an image one line at a time.  All you need is a Pixelstick and a camera with a long exposure model. Using the Pixelstick is quite easy: all you need to do is insert the SD card with the images on it. Set the camera to take a long exposure and select the image you want the Pixelstick to display.
The Pixelstick costs anywhere from $330 to $350 and can make producing patterns, logos and text in lighting much less frustrating to deal with. It makes it easier for great results without investing a lot of time.