Wow.  2 events in one night.  Both for a great cause.  The MRI crew zipped around the city last night, and man did we get some great stuff.  First we set up the booth at Gawker’s Blood Sweat and Beers event, then on uptown for the Museum of Arts and Design’s LED Ball.

If you’d like to see your photos for Gawker, click here.

To see photos from the LED ball, click here.

Thanks to everyone who came out and got lit up with us.

LightBomber is the featured app today on Piictu!  What is Piictu?  It’s a brilliant photo sharing app that allows you to share photos as part of a “stream”.  Think of it like a conversation. Someone starts a topic (‘what’s in my pockets today’, for example) and then users from all over the world can contribute photos to that topic!

It’s a blast, get Piictu right here.

How does LightBomber fit in?  Well the good folks at Piictu have made a special LightBomber stream for their users to post photos to!  To make it easier for everyone, we’ve made LightBomber free today!  So go grab it in the app store if you don’t have it yet, get Piictu, and post those LightBombs to the stream called “your best LightBomber piic”.

To do that, all you have to do is take/select the photo you want to post, and in the “new stream” field, just start typing “your best lightbomber piic” until the stream comes up.  Or, you can find it as a featured stream on the “discover” tab in Piictu.  Have fun!

Long exposures can take you to a lot of awesome places.  One of our LightBombers, called AlienMeatSack is ready to go to every single one of those places.  He’s taken LightBomber to its extremes, which not only resulted in some awesome feedback for us, it also resulted in some of our favorite work in the app.  It’s all about variety with this guy, and let’s face it, an amazing name.  Today, we’re all Alien Meat Sacks folks.  Let’s check out some work and get some inspiration.

First of all, take a look at that portrait above.  That’s been our favorite thing lately, the really crazy (and slightly evil) portraits you can create.

Hanging lights from a ceiling fan? Why didn’t we think of that?

Stable camera, hand drawn illustration.  What we love about this one is a) the style of it (dude has some drawing skills, right?) and b) the use of negative space.  More of this, please.

He even figured out how to LightBomb during the day.  This is a whole new world now.  Daylightbombing?  The world isn’t ready…

This one is all about the light or combo of lights.  When we talked to him, it was pretty clear he had become a full-on light addict, and it shows in his work.  Moving lights to and from the lens is also an underrated move.

This is from a couple weeks ago, when we were showcasing abstract work.  Fantastic.

Yet another spin (heyo!) with the ceiling fan.  If we had a ceiling fan between us, this would be us every single night.

Ok that about does it.  We just want to say a big thank you to AlienMeatSack for all the great work.  We hope you’ve found a little inspiration in it.  Get LightBomber and get out there.

There’s not a whole lot we can say about these photos, other than that they are incredible, they came from Gjon Mili, the man who famously shot Picasso making a lightpainting, and that we hope you find some inspiration in them.  We did for sure.  In fact, we’re going to take LightBomber for a stroboscopic spin once we can find a ballerina with some time to kill.

To get shots like this with LightBomber, first you’ll need LightBomber (heh).  After you’re all loaded up, stabilize your iPhone with a tripod…or a shoe…or rest it on a bottle of hot sauce (sriracha is the reigning champ).  Then, start an exposure.  While the exposure is going, have your subject move across the frame.  Point a bright light on them multiple times while they are in different places, or (if you’re feeling frisky), pop a few flashes.  Boom!  You’re stroboscoping!

Obviously we all have a loooong way to go to reach the level that Gjon Mili was at (and more than 60 years ago, no less) but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to try.  Check out the photos below for some more ideas, then get out there and capture some motion guys!

While cruising the LightBomber gallery (as we tend to do…all the time…) we started to notice these brilliant abstract patterns coming from our users.  These kinds of photos are attractive for their mystery.  A more “traditional” light painting will reveal a subject surrounded in light, and those are the ones that will hook you in every time because they beg the question, “how is it possible for that light and that person to co-exist in the same frame?”  It boggles the mind, in a great way.  Like Inception.

However, when you go deeper, you end up getting shots like these abstract ones we’ve curated.  They offer little to no explanation, and the light source/subject are often one and the same.  We really appreciate these kind of shots.  Sure, some would argue that patterns like the ones below are easily created in Photoshop/Illustrator.  That’s valid.  You know what is amazing though?  These were not.  They were created when a LightBomber thought to point their app at a strange collection of lights, and used those lights to weave an impossible texture.  We love when that happens, and we hope you do too.  Get LightBomber and go nuts.  #LBAbstract.

Quick note:  apologies for the different image sizes.  These images were shot at different points during the app’s lifecycle.

Well this is unbelievable.  Squarepusher utterly reinventing himself…with the greatest light rig ever.  Ever.  We’re about to LightBomb our computer screens.  Album is called Ufabulum, out May 14th/15th.  Yes.  We will be there.

Click here to view the embedded video.

]]> http://www.mrilightpainting.com/2012/04/we-love-this-squarepusher-dark-steering/feed/ 0 http://www.mrilightpainting.com/2012/04/lightbomber-the-eye-of-magnetry/ http://www.mrilightpainting.com/2012/04/lightbomber-the-eye-of-magnetry/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:30:48 +0000 MRI Lightpainting http://www.mrilightpainting.com/?p=1083

While cruising instagram we came across these LightBombs by an instagrammer named MAGNETRY.  He was clearly having a great time with the app (at a hockey game no less), so we absolutely had to post his images.  Part of the fun of LightBombing is “the eye” that you start to develop.  You start to notice the lights in the world.  Crazy LED lights and displays look brighter to you, they jump out more.  Christmas lights, traffic signals and weird lights in the distance quickly transition from simple utilities into kick ass playthings.

Naturally, a hockey game is going to have some sweet lights, and we’re happy that Magnetry had his “eye” (and his LightBomber app) trained on them.  Awesome images.  Get LightBomber right here and let’s see what you can do.

HUGE thanks to everyone who jumped into our photo booth at the Bing and Cheezburger event at SXSW.  You guys were aces all around.  Great ideas, great vibes, great music, troll faces and high fives.  We couldn’t have asked for a better crowd.  If you’re lookin for your photos, they should be up on the Bing and Cheezburger Facebook pages now.

If you’d like more info about our photo booths, click here, and if you’d like to make your own light art, try LightBomber, our iPhone app!

Thanks again and Happy SXSW everyone!  Drink lots of water, cover everything in BBQ sauce, and remember:

Soon after launching LightBomber, we started to see these gorgeous high contrast fashion style shots from a mysterious user called fStop8.  We were instantly obsessed, and anxiously awaited new work from this mystery shooter.  Shot after shot blew our minds, so we wanted to post them here.

But who was fStop?  Clearly they were experienced.  The composition of the shots is brilliant, and whoever it was clearly used a tripod and an off camera flash…a Canon 580 ex 2, to be exact.  That was the only information we could get out of a comment on one of their photos.

Also, the use of the “ambient” light setting in LightBomber to shift the color and blow out the grain of the photos was a nice touch.  “Well played, fStop, well played indeed”, said Michelle as she stroked an imaginary beard and blew bubbles out of a pipe, “We must find this fStop and absorb her genius.”

So we did some digging.  We grabbed our discs and our pre-Lebowski Jeff Bridges smirks and entered the mysterious world that our developers call “The Back End”,  (dun dun dunnnn, for sure) where after a lot of sweet battles with huge special effects budgets and maaaaad lasers, we found fStop’s contact info.

Turns out, fStop is my father.  And a ghost.  And Bruce Willis.

Alright alright enough messing around.  Turns out we had been enjoying the work of one of our favorite photographers, Angelique Ambrosio, who is a friend of MRI and assists us on our many Bar Mitzvah photo booths.  Which is amazing.  Though not a traditional light painter, we’re psyched to see what LightBomber can do in the hands of a very accomplished photographer with a great sense of studio lighting and portrait work like Angelique.  That said, hats off to the one and only fStop/Angelique.  Enjoy more of her lightbombs here, get LightBomber here, and stay tuned as we feature more work by our favorite LightBombers.

What you are looking at is a long exposure photograph of a bunch of LED-laden roombas (robo-vacuum cleaners) fighting for square footage in a dark, empty room.  Brilliant.

Controlling the path of light has always been an obsession of ours, and though orbs and such are cool, there is something really astonishing about the robotic discipline of these light paths, with a certain added chaos brought on by having more than one robot compete (or fight to the death) for the same space.    We tried something similar back in the day with a remote control car, and we got similar results, but after seeing these shots, a re-shoot with multiple cars might be in order.

These shots were created by a group of smart folks with Roombas on Flickr.  Check out more of their stuff here, and thanks to Ae for the tip!  (via ThisIsColossal)