New Light Painting

[Chrislaf]

Here's a Light Painting mission that I did tonight (April 17/25) with my Phantom 3 Standard. There are a total of 531 waypoints.

Chris

 

[Capt KO]

Enjoy your work.. Nice to see the old bird still has wings.

 

[Chrislaf]

Thanks. Yeah the P3S does a good job especially with Wes’ Litchi utilities.

Chris

 

[Chrislaf]

Here's another one from last night. This one had 861 waypoints. It was one of the more complex ones I have done with the P3S and was pretty much at the limit of the P3S battery. The flight was 15m 54s and I landed with 15% battery remaining.

Other than the sky being cloudy, the conditions were ideal for Light Painting with ground wind speed being only 4 km/h.

Chris

 

[Chrislaf]

Here's one from last night. This one had 456 Waypoints.

I am currently working on another mission that if successful will have four different colours. To do this each colour has to be flown as a separate waypoints mission and then all four images need to be combined in post to create the final image.

Chris

 

[waterwin]

These are very nice. Can you tell me a bit about how this works ? What do you use as light source and how do you switch the source on and off in mid flight or per pre-set waypoints. How do you set up a flight with the needed waypoints to get to the figure outline. Thank you.

Erwin

 

[Chrislaf]

These are very nice. Can you tell me a bit about how this works ? What do you use as light source and how do you switch the source on and off in mid flight or per pre-set waypoints. How do you set up a flight with the needed waypoints to get to the figure outline. Thank you.

Erwin

Thanks!

For a detailed description of how the process works please see this page Light Painting With WayPoints created by Wes Barris @DJ Wes who has created a series of utilities to facilitate Light Painting and many other things that can be done with Litchi.

For my light source I use Ulanzi cube lights which are basically Lumecube clones but for a fraction of the cost. What I like about them is that they come with colour filters so you have the ability to change the colour of the light. There are also many other types of lights you can use. You then need a way to attach the light to your drone - there are many options on Amazon or Temu or similar sites.

You do not switch the light on or off mid-flight, the light must be on before you take-off and stays on for the duration of the flight. To draw sections of an image inside of the image and avoid light trails to that section, the drone is programmed to turn around so the light is not visible while it moves to that section, then turn back around. You still need to do a bit of clean-up in post because there is some light bleed.

Here is what the mountain biker mission in my post above looks like in the horizontal plane before it is rotated vertically.

And here is the rotated mission ready to be flown.

POI #1 is the approximate location of my camera on a tripod where the light(s) face. POI #2 is the point the drone faces when it turns around (light pointing away from camera) and is moving between sections of the image.

This whole process can sound daunting but once you learn the basic steps involved and try it a few times it becomes much easier. Wes' utilities have greatly automated the process and have been a game changer.

One of the great things about light painting is that you don't need the latest drone to do it. I am using my old Phantom 3 Standard that otherwise would not be used for anything else - it keeps that old bird useful.

Feel free to ask questions.

Chris