Light painting is great fun, and you don’t need professional equipment to do it either.  Many point and shoot cameras will allow you to take a 30 second exposure, so all you need is a tripod, and some coloured lights to paint with.

You can use torches and put coloured celophane over the ends using rubber bands, but I find using lots of little lights gives the best effect. There are lots of LED lights you can buy cheaply from places like Bunnings or even the cheaper discount stores, but none of them are that big. I decided to make my own ‘wand’ using LED strip lights and battery kits bought on ebay, which you can change the colours of using a remote control. You can get 1m strips of LED’s on ebay for under $10, and all you need to do is power them somehow. I used battery packs that hold 8 AA batteries and soldered them to the board.

I will post a blog about how I built the RGB light wand soon, but for now have a look at the results…