This month, the lighting corner brings you one of the most creative and unique products to breathe new life into your light painting: The Fotorgear Magilight Light Painting Stick. Read on to learn how to add some fun to your shoots!
The first thing you think when you open the package is “This looks like a light sabre!” Or at least, that was my first thought. Yours might be different … but shouldn’t be 😊
Magilight is very well built – there’s very little plastic (the diffuser for the light) – everything else is high quality aluminium. There are 144 RGB LEDs in the wand, plus a hole where you can insert a sparkler. The wand itself is waterproof, too!
There’s a small display with buttons to control the settings. It’s fairly intuitive to use. You can choose almost any solid colour, whether the colour blinks or not, how fast it blinks, how bright it is and how long the LEDs will illuminate.
You can quickly and easily illuminate anything in almost any colour you can imagine.
Where Magilight shines – literally and figuratively – is its ability to create images and patterns. It comes with a Micro SD card full of artwork – everything from lines to shapes to characters. These shapes can be combined with traditional photography techniques, such as portraiture, to create mind-blowing images created completely in camera.
You can create your own artwork and copy to the SD card, such as product logos and branding.
We have two add-ons that you can use to further expand your light painting repertoire: the Roller and Mini-Stick.
The Roller let’s you lock your Magilight into one spot and create circular images, such as planets or globes. You can create your own custom circular images, as well.
The Mini-Stick is a smaller version of the Magilight wand – you simply swap the controller unit from Magilight onto the Mini-Stick. Mini uses 43 smaller LED bulbs and can display everything the larger Magilight can – from colours to images to artwork.
Fotorgear has a full series of videos on how to use and customize your Magilight: https://www.fotorgear.com/pages/tutorial
About the Author – Will Prentice (www.capturaphoto.ca) is a professional photographer based out of Whitby, Ontario and Brand Specialist – Lighting for Amplis.
