Holiday Nutcracker Light Painting

Nutcracker Envy

During a recent photo shoot I had an opportunity to do some daytime light painting with model Mely who posed for me. Here Mely protects a bag of peanuts from the hungry Nutcrackers painted in the background using my latest version 3 LED light stick. She did excellent work posing and remaining still during the long exposures.

My camera is on a tripod as I trigger the camera shutter from the light stick to begin painting the background.

I didn't move out of the way in time, so I did some Photoshop work to remove me from the photo above. I wish I had worn a black shirt. A strobe flash at max setting fired at the end of the 13 second exposure using the camera's rear curtain flash setting. My camera settings were F11, ISO 200, 24 mm lens with a 3 stop neutral density filter. The LEDs are so bright at the subject distance (10 ft.), I needed the ND filter.

In Photoshop I had some fun animating the Nutcrackers in a GIF file:

A photo where I purposely used only the light stick to illuminate the photo capture wrapping light around Mely.

Upside down:

A block diagram of the setup:

The light stick features a 228 LED neopixel strip from Adafruit controlled by a Teensy 2.0 microcomputer board, linked over Adafruit CC3000 WiFi to an Android tablet for loading images into the stick's SPI SRAM 512K byte memory storage. I wrote the controller software with Arduino IDE and libraries from Adafruit.

A diagram of the LED stick controller major electronic components:

The actual LED stick controller circuit before mounting in a box:

HTTP protocol for loading images using the stick's web server:

Here is a screen shot of the Android tablet app I wrote to load the Nutcracker image. I coded it in Java with Processing libraries using Android Studio as the IDE (integrated development environment). With some code changes I could convert it into a Java PC notebook application because it's Processing based.