A common question is what light painting tools I recommend for light painting for night photography. Here’s what I recommend — and why.
I’ll start with the most inexpensive light painting choices and work my way up.
Light painting is a term that is often used loosely to describe any addition of light to a night photograph. Really, though, light painting is a technique that uses a handheld light source to illuminate a scene during a long exposure. You are quite literally painting light on a subject. Your light source is your brush. Night photographers have used this technique for many decades.
I also wrote an in-depth article about purchasing light painting tools for cheap. I encourage you to read this and see why I recommend what I do.
For white light only, I would recommend the Wurkkos FC-11 (review here). It holds detail well and has a pleasing warm white light.
Use some gels from a $5 Roscolux Swatchbook sample booklet. Simply put these in front of your flashlight. Bam. Done.
Another option is the Colorshine light. I have never used this, but hear that it produces good results. Best of all, the light typically sells for under $33. It produces “10 different LED colors with flash and smooth color-change modes” which they describe as “red, green, blue, orange, turquoise, purple, yellow, cyan, violet, and white.”
Read about more inexpensive color options for light painting lights here.
Another possibility is to use an LED panel instead of a flashlight, simply using it as a handheld light instead of a stationary light (which isn’t really light painting anyway). I use a Lume Cube RGB Panel Pro 2.0, which has a high-quality light and holds detail well. You can read an in-depth review of the Lume Cube RGB Panel here.
This is a high-quality light that you can use for handheld light painting. You may need to wrap black Cinefoil or something similar around it to prevent the panel from shining into the camera lens if you are walking through the scene.
Another possibility is a Luxli light panel. There are some that have accessories that surround the light, similar to what you are doing with Cinefoil, so it prevents you from inadvertently shining the light into the camera lens and causing giant streaks.
Currently, the highest-quality LED flashlight with RGB that I know of is the Ants on a Melon RGB Critter 2.0. It has a high-quality light and holds detail well. You can read an in-depth review of the RGB Critter 2.0 as it pertains specifically to light painting here.
The challenge of the RGB Critter is that the user interface is challenging. It involves either pressing buttons simultaneously or pressing a sequence of buttons to change colors, brightness, and functions. It produces 39 colors, all rich and vibrant. However, you have no control over the saturation. You cannot produce any other colors besides the 39 colors. Still, though, those 39 colors would be more than enough for most people. The challenge here is primarily the confusing user interface. This also includes through the colors to reach another color instead of going straight to it.
The light that I use, as well as the one all the Nightaxians use, is a ProtoMachines light. It’s meticulously designed for light painting scenes and subjects. The ProtoMachines light offers easily accessible, on-the-fly control over saturation and brightness from 1-100%, a timer, user presets, and more. The form function is perfect.
Before you get too excited, there are two issues.
One is that they are not cheap. Their products range in price from the Radium LED light wand at $249 to the LED8 at $559.
The other is that, as of this writing, they are currently not available.
They are worth every cent, in my opinion. The form factor, quality of light, and ease of use inspire creativity are second to none. They are, in short, the best.
They are so good that I would encourage you to ask to get on the ProtoMachines waiting list so you can be notified when they release new products. Many of us are hoping for this.
Do you have any light painting tools that you would recommend? Please leave them in the comments!
This Is War evolved out of my work as a photographer covering some of the bloodiest conflicts of the late 20th century. The imagery is not pretty, nor could it be. But seeing it—looking squarely at the misery delivered by leaders who promised to do good for their people—is important. More than that, refusing to see it, whether out of personal or political discomfort, is a form of misinformation.
The book tells the story of war through the experiences of both civilians and combatants. The civilians were entering a labyrinth of grief that they would occupy for the rest of their lives. Many of the combatants naively viewed war as an opportunity, only to discover that their bodies were mere fodder for the powerful.
I first picked up a camera in El Salvador in the mid-1980s. I photographed the bodies that the notorious death squads left on street corners at night. In the early ’90s, I was posted to the former Yugoslavia, and later, to Africa. Unscrupulous leaders, driven by ego, profit, and ethnic, religious, or nationalist agendas, waged war on civilians and turned villages into killing fields.
To be a war photographer is to forge an intimate relationship with the dead and dying. We occupy disparate worlds, empathizing with those reeling from profound loss, even while interacting with those who take human lives. To witness brutality is to sustain psychic damage: What the eye sees, the brain records and cannot erase. For the war photographer, the conjunction of horror and opportunity adds a further twist.
I understood this ambivalence while photographing street battles between rival militias in Monrovia, Liberia, in 1996. I came upon a man foraging for food in a destroyed shop. A group of fighters pounced on him. They ignored his pleas for mercy as they dragged him through the streets and, moments later, executed him.
Developing the film in the quiet of my hotel room, I retched as I relived what I had seen an hour earlier: A group of teenagers stripped an unarmed man who did not expect to die that day to his underwear and socks and murdered him in a ditch for no apparent reason. But I was also gratified when I discovered that the photos were in focus and powerful. I knew they would distinguish my career, and they did.
My life as a war photographer was punctuated by such moments of cognitive dissonance. Photographing the wounded in frenetic hospitals, mothers rocking in grief, soldiers stepping on land mines, and militiamen taunting, torturing, and killing one another, I wrestled with the awareness that the most painful episodes of these people’s lives were also occasions on which a part of me thrived.
I produced this work at a frenzied pace: airport, war, photograph, airport, war, repeat. My images exposed atrocities, signaled the beginnings of epidemics, and set off alarms in world capitals. But as the years passed, I became aware that with each war, what I gained in stature as a photojournalist, I lost in human empathy.
The realization drove me from my profession and led me to another: documenting war crimes in West Africa for a human-rights organization by means of witness testimony. Immersing myself in a world of policy, justice, and state building, I worked to stop the atrocities I had witnessed as a conflict photographer. I had a daughter, I fostered a son, and I didn’t look back.
I stuffed boxes of negatives from my photojournalism days into footlockers. And then, 20 years later, I pulled them out again and saw the images I’d made through a different prism. I had spent decades analyzing how states fail and why wars persist. Raising children had forever altered my understanding of the aching magnitude of loss, and how this loss, if not managed, drives ever more violence.
This Is War represents a deeply personal journey—a reckoning with what I witnessed over a tumultuous decade and the toll it took on me. But the book is also my contribution to the historical record of the conflicts covered and the role women have played in conflict photojournalism.
My work is also a call for reflection on why conflicts relapse. Way too many of the images I took decades ago could be taken today. At the time of writing, war has returned to Sudan, while in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it never left. El Salvador’s ideological war has been replaced by bloody gang violence. In Bosnia, ethnic tensions are on the rise. In too many places, the factors that drove conflicts in decades past—predatory governance, corruption, and crushing poverty—continue unabated. These images are a reminder that the parts of the world that are broken still need a durable fix.
To be the last person a dying woman, or a condemned man, sees on Earth is a morally uncomfortable thing, but also one that conveys a certain responsibility. War photographers are historians, artists, trespassers, and emotional bandits with complicated motives, some virtuous, some not. The images themselves, at their best, extract the essence of conflict, beseeching the viewer to honor those who have perished and to protect the rest of humanity from its worst, most abject failure: its capacity for war.
This article was excerpted from Corinne Dufka’s book This Is War: A Decade of Conflict: Photographs
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Due to the spontaneity of the shoot, the 28 images have an authentic, off-the-cuff feel to them. Trying to be as “unobtrusive” as possible, Angela lent into the natural light of the hall, which she says helped to “set the tone”: the beige colours and low light from the blind-covered windows create a muted palette that contrasts with the palpable warmth of the people and relationships on show. “I focussed on the participants, with the simple hall backdrop highlighting their interactions and the essence of the game.” Players are shown chatting away, sat at a long table waiting for the game to start; a digital number randomiser glows red, its operator sat proudly behind; and an array of chocolates and homeware are all labelled, ready to be snapped up.
A particular image that stands out to Angela is one of her nan and two friends taking a break, making a cup of tea and grabbing a few biscuits. Framed by the hatch that opens into the kitchen, the image has a satisfying composition, each figure at a different stage of the tea-making process. Depicting what Angela describes as a “very simple, yet very British moment”, the image fittingly won an award in British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Britain 2022 and was displayed across the UK on screens and billboards, a fact that made Angela’s nan “very proud”.
The series gained new relevance in 2020, when the Covid lockdowns put an end to such gatherings. “This halt was especially poignant, considering the effort community members, like Janet and her late husband Karl who passed away during the pandemic, put into these games,” Angela says. “It wasn’t solely about bingo, it symbolised community building and provided a haven of joy in a town with limited recreational activities.” Through the series, Angela wants people to recognise how important such gatherings are, especially for elderly individuals who often rely on such events to keep loneliness at bay. Now, the photographer is preparing for Church Bingo to be displayed at a public exhibition in Heywood’s first outdoor gallery. In the wake of Covid, she hopes such exposure will push people to again start organising local recreational events, bringing communities together once more.
Ryan Rice grew up in Carter County and it remains his favorite place to share the beauty of the region.
He now lives in Gray and works for an IT company based in Kingsport, but he explained Carter County is special because of number of mountainous terrain. Rice was one of three local photographers who had their shots chosen for the Tennessee Wildlife Federation’s annual calendar.
You’ve probably seen that a lot of YouTubers love their LUMIX cameras. They’re indeed really great for a variety of things. But we know that photographers are the ones who read this site, and photographers come first here. The LUMIX S5II is truly one of the best full-frame cameras that you can get your hands on if you’re looking for something that can give you special images. If you really want to do less post-production, we’ve got a camera kit for you that we know you’re going to love.
This article is presented in partnership with Lumix.
There are a lot of things about the LUMIX S5II that make it such a great camera for photographers. Ergonomically speaking, it appeals to the nice feeling of having a dial on either side of the viewfinder the same way they did in the film days. Then there’s the high resolution EVF that’s easy to see, the LCD screen that can help you take a photo in almost any angle you need, and so much more. Recently, there’s been talk of the sloped shutter button of cameras and how nice that can be for the ergonomics. The Lumix S5II has that for sure. But what’s even more special here is how they implemented the front dial. It’s right around the shutter button, so you don’t even really need to move your finger from it.
Combine all this with the features like scene detection autofocus, AF-Scope focusing, Real Time LUT, and so much more. This is an incredible camera for any working photographer that wants something lightweight, durable, and reliable.
This is the kit lens that comes with the LUMIX S5II. And we truly have to say that originally, we didn’t appreciate this lens. But the versatility that it allows is something that really isn’t talked about all that much, and so therefore people don’t understand it. It’s wider than your standard 24-70mm f4 lens — which doesn’t seem like a lot with just 4mm extra. But the difference can be huge. It might mean that you don’t need to take an extra step back or set your tripod even lower. And on the longer end, it becomes almost like working between a 50mm and 85mm lens. You just need to step back and forth as needed.
We’ve often called this lens the best nifty 50mm on the market, and we stand by that. The LUMIX 50mm f1.8 S is lightweight, fast to focus, and weather resistant. It also shares the same 67mm filter thread as most of the company’s other lenses. It can genuinely just do everything very well and if there’s a single prime that’s bound to stay stuck on your camera, it’s this one.
We recommend the LUMIX 85mm f1.8 for several reasons. First off, it’s the longest lens on this list. If you need something longer, the LUMIX S5II has a built in crop mode that lets it reach even further. It also has all the benefits of the 50mm f1.8. But we mostly recommend this lens for candid shooting, portraits, and product photography where you really want the bokeh to make a subject pop.
It’s truly one of our favorite lenses for the L Mount. The L-mount alliance was founded by Lecia, LUMIX and Sigma years ago. The three brands share autofocus algorithms, exposure data, and more through the mount so that their cameras and lenses can work as seamlessly as possible – allowing for a new level of freedom and choice. Photographers have options ranging from affordable to higher-end photographic instruments to make images that will enchant audiences. If you’re photographing while on a hike, in the desert, at a sports arena, or even at a local studio, LUMIX has a lens that can help the translation between your artistic and technical minds with ease.
Art Basel and UBS recently issued their latest annual Survey of Global Collecting, which analyses the habits and attitudes of more than 2,800 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) across the world. These affluent clients, who each have more than $1m of disposable wealth (excluding real estate and private business assets), keep the art trade bubbling, as the high end of the market was “key to maintaining aggregate growth” in 2022, according to the report. For auction houses and dealers, “the $1m-plus segment tended to fare better than other lower-price tiers”, it states.
However, among the survey’s findings is the cautionary note that, in the first half of 2023, only 9% of these wealthy respondents considered buying works priced at more than $1m, down from 12% in 2021. This decrease points to an “increasingly thin high-end following the strong post-Covid-19 bounce-back in sales”.
The most recent Art Basel and UBS Art Market report, which offers a wider view of the industry, estimates that the art trade last year turned over about $67.8bn in sales, about 5% more (discounting inflation) than its estimated $64.6bn turnover in 2011, when the market had recovered from the 2008 financial crisis.
The key indicator of health in the international art market, as in national economies, is growth. Yet the art trade is a relatively small global business in which sales have, by and large, flatlined for the past 11 years. Given that the population of the world’s HNWIs has more than doubled since 2011, according to UBS data, why is this the case?
Clare McAndrew, the economist who prepares the Art Basel and UBS reports, says that last year was “a very clear example of the high end carrying the rest of the market—but then we got this quite subdued result overall”. McAndrew adds that, although no one seems to know how many of the world’s 59.4 million millionaires and 2,640 billionaires regularly buy art, the number is “relatively small, so a widening of interest and spending across all segments would certainly mean more substantial growth”.
In other words, aggregate sales struggle to grow because the international art market has become over-reliant on a niche group of ultra-wealthy buyers. Significant growth could, theoretically, be achieved if the customer base expanded and individuals of more modest means bought lower-priced items in “scalable” quantities, as is the case in the $355bn luxury industry.
But how can that happen when the research of distinguished economists such as Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman and Branco Milanović tells us that the middle classes in high-income nations are being squeezed by the forces of global income inequality, as more and more wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the 0.1% and 0.01%?
Unlike the art spending of the wealthy, the buying patterns of “professional class” collectors attract relatively little systematic study. But anecdotal evidence of shrinkage abounds in the art and collectibles markets.
“I remember one time, about 15 years ago, at Tefaf Maastricht, we wrote 81 invoices. This year, we did the same turnover, a little more even, and wrote five [invoices],” says the London-based antique map dealer Daniel Crouch. His experience exemplifies the much-heard observation among today’s art and antiques dealers that buyers are fewer but buy at higher price levels.
Yet other, younger players are aiming to reinvigorate the market from the bottom up, to try to democratise the ownership of high-quality art by serious practitioners. The Amsterdam-based online marketplace Avant Arte, for instance, has collaborated with contemporary artists since 2017 to produce affordable editioned prints and sculptural multiples. Begun as a blog in 2014 by 20-somethings Christian Luiten and Curtis Penning, Avant Arte now has 2.6 million followers on Instagram and has worked with 241 artists to date, including big names such as Ai Weiwei, Elizabeth Peyton, Jenny Holzer and Tschabalala Self. The company has sold more than 22,000 of its editioned works, says an Avant Arte spokesperson.
“The imbalance for me was that art can have a profound impact on people, intellectually and emotionally. And yet when you look at it next to music or fashion or other areas of culture that have built a much more democratic base, the breadth of impact is nowhere,” says Mazdak Sanii, the chief executive of Avant Arte, who, like Luiten and Penning, transitioned into contemporary art from the popular music scene.
Avant Arte recently surveyed what it calls its “new generation” buyers and found that 90% of respondents, more than half of whom are under 40, “didn’t find the art world welcoming”, says Sanii. “These younger collectors are going to provide at least part of the answer,” he adds, noting that the average price of an Avant Arte print is about €2,000.
Although prints have been democratising good art for centuries, Phillips New York gave this subset of the market a boost 15 years ago when it cannily rebranded prints by popular artists such as Warhol, Hockney, Hirst and Banksy as cooler-sounding “editions”, echoing the must-have limited offerings of the luxury industry. From 2008 to 2023, Phillips’s annual turnover in its worldwide Editions auctions increased by 827%. Last year, the department achieved sales of $40m, up almost 30% on 2022.
Other auction houses and companies like Avant Arte have followed Phillips in rebranding prints as editions. It seems the bigger challenge, given the prevalent perception of the art world as socially and financially intimidating, is how to encourage a wider audience to buy unique pieces.
At the rock-bottom price point of £200 or lower, the Instagram-based Artist Support Pledge (ASP) has proved a game-changer since its launch by the Sussex-based painter Matthew Burrows at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. The platform has posted more than one million original works since then, resulting in estimated sales of about £100m, according to Burrows. But he adds that turnover has slowed since the ebbing of the pandemic.
“The good news is that the Artist Support Pledge is expanding,” says Burrows. ASP is now working with the tech company Vortic to create a virtual gallery in which artists can show works of any value in their own dedicated exhibition space, provided they also post works on the original ASP site. The initiative is due to go live early next year. “The new platform is designed to give artists more autonomy in how and when their work is presented for sale while maintaining the ethos of a reciprocal economy,” adds Burrows.
At the same time, brick-and-mortar galleries are also doing their best to encourage a new generation of young professionals to buy original contemporary art. South London-based Copperfield is one of the many galleries now offering generous pay-by-installment terms to buyers who cannot afford to splash thousands in one go.
“One person quit their gym and used that amount to pay off monthly a small work by Larry Achiampong, while they took to running in the park,” says Copperfield director Will Lunn. “That work was really meaningful to them, and we were really pleased to make it possible.”
But can these sorts of lower-price initiatives really revive the international art trade’s moribund middle market in the way that, say, perfume has bolstered the luxury and beauty industries? According to the business data company Statista, worldwide sales in the fragrances market are set to hit $58.3bn in 2023—not far off Art Basel and UBS’s annual sales estimates for the entire global art market since 2011. Sales of the legendary Chanel No.5 accounted for about one-third of Chanel’s $12.3bn revenue in 2021, the perfume’s 100th anniversary, according to the Financial Times. A 35ml bottle currently sells for around £71, considerably less than even a £200 unique work from the Artist Support Pledge.
“The brand name is one of the most powerful assets for the luxury house,” says Kelly Meng Parnwell, a lecturer in luxury brand management at Goldsmiths, University of London. “Consumers buy lower-valued products with a luxury logo, not for the product’s aesthetic value, but for the social value that luxury brands can provide to them.”
Herein lies the problem for the art market’s “affordable” end. In relative terms, works by an interesting if little-known artist priced in the low thousands, or even the hundreds, can seem good value. But in a cash-strapped consumer culture dominated by luxury brands, if you can buy a legend for £71, pretty well all art looks expensive.
This week, punk music photographer Chelse Warren takes us into the pit.
We hop a tiny train to discover the miniature wonders of a West Virginia model railroad.
Then, we journey to eastern Kentucky, where they’re reclaiming their bootlegging heritage – along a new moonshine trail.
You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.
In This Episode:
Over the summer, Mason Adams visited a two-day DIY music festival called The Floor is Gone.
In the middle of it all was photographer Chelse Warren, who goes by Openhead Takes Photos online.
Mason reached out to talk music and more.
Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Along with trees and candy canes, trains have become a symbol of the holiday season. Think: the Polar Express, or Santa-themed excursions on local railroads. And generations of people grew up hoping to find electric train sets under the tree on Christmas Day.
These days, model train sets are enjoyed by grownup collectors and hobbyists.
Folkways Reporter Zack Harold visited a model train club in West Virginia and brings us the story.
Kentucky is known for its bourbon. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only liquor with a history in the state.
A group of distillers wants to attract more visitors to eastern Kentucky by focusing on its historic ties to moonshine.
Shepherd Snyder has the story.
Travis Stimeling, a musicology professor and the director of the Bluegrass and Old-Time Bands at West Virginia University (WVU), died on Nov. 15. They were 44.
Stimeling was a big figure in Appalachian academia, and played an important role in establishing the Appalachian Studies and Appalachian Music programs at WVU. Stimeling spoke with Inside Appalachia several times.
In 2021, Caitlin Tan interviewed Stimeling about a book they edited called, “The Opioid Epidemic and U.S. Culture: Expression, Art, and Politics in an Age of Addiction.”
In memory of Stimeling, we replayed that interview.
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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Collective Action, Dimension Six, Gaol, Sultry, Sean Watkins, Hurlbut-Kaukonen, Tyler Childers, Steve Earle and Gerry Milnes.
Bill Lynch is our producer. Zander Aloi is our associate producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens.
You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
You can find us on Instagram, Threads and Twitter @InAppalachia. Or here on Facebook.
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Inside Appalachia is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
