The Pixelstick comes with eight demo patterns to get you started and there are plenty of image packs to add to your collection on the Pixelstick website - simply download them onto a SD card and pop it in the slot. If you are thinking of travelling with the Pixelstick, I would suggest investing in a protective hard-case. I would worry about how much bashing the Pixelstick could take, as it is mostly plastic and this made it feel delicate, but if it wasn’t, its weight would greatly increase, making it harder to use. It can even travel with you on flights as carry-on luggage. The Pixelstick has a collapsed height of 42" and will pack away nicely into the included padded carry bag. The Pixelstick is easy enough to use it takes a little bit of practice to get the timings right and you will need a steady hand to get a smooth image, but the speed at which the image is flashed through the LEDs can be adjusted, as well as the brightness and white balance, giving you lots of options to play with. Then, think of the Pixelstick like a printer: you need to glide it through the air to ‘print’ the image - you won’t be able to see the image whilst you are doing it, but the results will be visible on your camera whilst the Pixelstick and person using it will remain invisible. To use the Pixelstick, you need a camera on a tripod set up to take a long exposure photograph. It is then used to create beautiful effects through long exposure. The Pixelstick is more than just a light bar - it is a device with 200 LEDs that can be programmed to produce graphics, photos and patterns – if you have an image, Pixelstick can reproduce it. I was excited enough to see the Pixelstick on TV and was positively bouncing off the walls when it came into the office. Since then my friends and family have been subjected various odd requests whenever we have been out in the dark with my DSLR, included running around with illuminated balloons, writing with sparklers and creating Christmas trees from glow sticks. In fact, one of my final pieces was of a long exposure on a bridge capturing the light trails left behind by the cars below - not very original, I know, but lots of fun. (If you pick one of these up, you’ll probably want to drop some more cash for a set of rechargable batteries, while you’re at it.One of my favourite lessons in A-level photography was learning how to play with long exposures and light. Just 4 days into the campaign, they’ve already more than doubled that (at the time of publishing, they’d raised just over $245,000.) Alas, the cheapest tier to actually come with a Pixelstick - the $250 “Early Bird” package - has long since sold out at this point, you’ll need to drop at least $300. Pixelstick set out to raise $110,000 on Kickstarter, a goal which they pretty much immediately destroyed. Oh, and the pixelstick can be unlocked and spun around its handle, allowing for all sorts of crazy experiments in spirography. If you havent already, check out the video above for some particularly impressive examples. You can load up a bunch of sequential images onto the SD card, then use the handbox to switch between them as you shoot a series of photos. While that in itself would be quite cool, things start to get really trippy when you bring in animation. Flash by flash, your ethereal imagery is burned onto your shot. Move it slowly in front of the open aperture of a camera during a long exposure, however, and each pixel becomes a paint stroke. To the naked eye, it’s a mess of flashing color. Pixelstick displays those images just one vertical line at a time. At the core of Pixelstick is a simple brain: a handheld controller, an SD card reader, and a bit of lightweight circuitry to parse images pulled from the card. More specifically, the Pixelstick is a 6’ bar containing 198 full color LEDs. Pixelstick takes that concept to a pretty ridiculous extreme.Īs its name implies, Pixelstick is… a stick of pixels. You, like many a bored digital camera owner before you, had discovered light painting. You were hardly halfway through the last letter of your name before you were running over to the camera to see if it worked. You started out simple, piercing the dark with a cheap handheld flashlight as you traced a terrible rendition of your name through the air. Remember that night when you and your friends discovered how to “draw” with your camera’s long exposure function?
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