The light drawing art you see on this web site is technically very simple to do yet requires a spatial awareness and an artistic talent that is difficult to describe.

All drawings displayed on this web site are performed freehand in mid-air using LED flashlights and captured in one long exposure photograph. Photoshop is used only to adjust the contrast and sharpness, to clean up some bad pixels and unwanted reflections and also crop the picture for display and printing.

That is the technical explanation but this art proves interesting in several other ways. Most people take photographs with the intent of capturing a static, clear and focused picture of an object or scene. They may want to stop the action of a moving figure or create the feeling of motion of an inanimate object.

In contrast, light drawing is the act of creating a photo of an object that does not exist in the material world. It can capture what we observe as a moving light source and display it in a photo as a fully recognizable form. It is now a snapshot of the fleeting imagination of the artist, a unique improvisational performance not unlike the recording of a jazz musician and can never be exactly reproduced.

We have constructed a palette of different colored light pens that are used as easily as paintbrushes. The long exposure photos are taken in a dark room, allowing as much time as needed to draw a multicolored picture, all in one exposure.

In the creation process, Lori will first imagine the completed drawing in her mind. She then procedes to wave the light pens around in the air, switching colors as needed, holding pens in both hands and her mouth. She is not able to see the finished product until the camera shutter is closed and the digital picture is displayed on a monitor. You may see many more of our drawings in our Flickr gallery.

The technique is not new and the effect has been used by many photographers.

Photographer Gjon Mili, known for his pictures of atheletes and dancers from the late 30's showed Picasso a picture of light traces made when he put small lights on the tips of jumping ice skater's blades. The immediate result was this "space drawing" of a centaur taken in 1949.

A different kind of example, but using the same technique is this long exposure picture taken by Richard Marklin on May 18, 1963 of the "Firefall", a nightly event in Yosemite National Park in which a large fire was pushed off of the cliffs above Curry Village. Read more about the firefall and the photo at Firefall.info

Jump ahead to the late 70's. Eric Staller demonstrates dramatic examples of light drawing using sparklers, christmas lights and hula hoops, all pre digital.

Here is an example of a long exposure shot of the Golden Gate Bridge in which the headlights from the cars form a river of light leaving San Francisco. The photo was borrowed from South Paw42's Flickr site.

Just a few years ago, a japanese artist group named PikaPika popularized light drawing as animation using the internet to bring their art to the world. Here is an amazing collection of their animated work. And here is a gallery of their light drawings on Flickr.

This history is a work in progress. Sprint commercials, poi twirling and more nocturnal photography to come!