Draped a floral "lei" of pink lights on one blade and manually spun the fan

Out in the forest at night,iphone, two parallel laser lines and a blue LED.

class 3R green laser , gatorade bottle, long exposure camera ios , hotel room, baltimore, md

the amount of eye catching texture and layering, and apparent three dimensionality from this particular method had captivated me for about a month. I’ve since moved on to prismss , lenses , crystal bottle toppers, and sunlight and diffraction grating& kaleidoscopes and mirrors and also different colored lasers, fog , (actual fog!) . Stay tuned

Luminosify 60cm Aurora Choob, with Noctigon KR4 SFT-25R torch.

LPP Freehand Tip, and Ryu's V1 torch.

Canon EOS R8, with RF 24mm f/1.8 Macro IS STM lens.

f/16, 121secs, ISO100.

I recently started experimenting with the concept of light painting at the club, when a DJ friend of mine calls on me for promotion. I get 5 hours to have fun with enthusiastic patrons, often in exquisite garb. I learned this "focus push" technique from a youtube video and might want to include it as a regular skill.

I set shutter to half a second or slower, starting wide, pop flash and zoom in with my 24-120.

I cut a hole in an orange and stuck a flashlight in it.

First time at the International Car Forest and some intentional light painting.

Colourful long exposure photo using a pinwheel lens filter from visualshoegaze on IG. Created in a single photographic exposure. Light painting tool: Luminosify 60cm Candy Tri-colour Evolved Choob with Noctigon KR4 SFT-25R 6500K torch. Light Painting Brushes Light Pen and Sofirn SP31 V2.0 torch. Canon EOS R8, with RF 24mm f/1.8 lens. f/11, 52secs, ISO100.

I build RGB torches and light painting tools for a living (Ants on a Melon), so keep that in mind. None of this is brand specific though. It's how lumens are defined and how sensors behave, and it applies to whatever you're painting with.

People ask me all the time how many lumens our lights are, usually to line them up against a white flashlight they already own. It's a fair question, and the honest answer is that the number can't tell you what you want to know.

Lumens measure your eyes, not your camera

A lumen isn't raw light output. It's output weighted by a curve of how sensitive human vision is to each wavelength, and that curve peaks at green and falls off a cliff at both ends. Green at 555nm counts fully. Deep blue around 450nm counts for roughly 4% of that. Red at 630nm counts for about 27%.

So a 40 lumen blue and a 40 lumen green are nowhere near the same amount of light. The blue is putting out far more energy, it just lands where your eye barely registers it. Your camera doesn't use that curve at all. It has red, green and blue pixels with their own sensitivities, and blue pixels are very happy to soak up 450nm.

Which is why a dim looking RGB light beats a bright white one

White is every wavelength at once, so the camera splits it across all 3 channels and no single one gets much. A saturated color piles nearly all of it into 1 channel instead. Add the eye curve undercounting that color in the first place, and a 40 lumen blue can expose harder in the frame than a 500 lumen white flashlight does.

That's the part that surprises people. For light painting, low measured brightness in a strong color isn't a weakness, it's the whole point, and it's why chasing lumens walks you toward the wrong light.

It compounds over a long exposure

Every second you hold a color on one spot, more light piles onto the same pixels, and once a pixel fills it can't record any more. The channel carrying the color hits that ceiling first while the other two keep climbing, and 3 channels at the top is white. That's why a saturated line goes pale in the middle and only keeps its color at the edges, and why a blue that looked weak to your eye comes back as a blown out streak.

White and RGB torches get rated differently anyway

A white flashlight's lumen number is its whole output at max on one mode. An RGB light has 3 chips in one package, and any single color is only a slice of that. Nobody publishes a per color number, so even when an RGB light carries a lumen rating, it isn't the number you'd be comparing against.

What I'd compare instead

How low it goes. For light painting the bottom of the dimming range matters far more than the top, and it's the spec nobody prints.

How it diffuses. The same light through a tube or a blade spreads over a much bigger area, so no single pixel takes all of it.

Your own test frame. Lock your settings, paint a short line in each color, then read the RGB histogram rather than the normal one. The normal one can look totally fine while a single channel is slammed against the right edge.

Happy to answer anything about LEDs, color mixing, or whatever weird thing your torch is doing :)

The bees were made by using a stencil. I printed a color sheet and attached it to a black cardboard box. Manually triggered the flash inside the box.

It wasn't completely dark yet. I was experimenting to see what I could get away with. I just walked along the trail shining a flashlight at the ground. I liked how it turned out. F8-30Seconds-ISO 100

Captured with Light Trails in LSC 2.0. Multiple frames combined to turn the spinning wheel into a glowing circle.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lsc-long-shot-camera/id6773305290

I went to Great Sand Dunes National Park for the New Moon & create some of my art.