Look what I found

[oleleclos]

Since I got the Nikon D800 I have been playing with stuff old and new, and with lots of different light. Today this emerged from the depths of a cupboard:



What is that, you might ask. THAT is a lightbrush. No, not a Photoshop plugin, but a real piece of hardware that produces pulsed flashlight that is used to "paint" objects with light.

This is what they said about lightbrushing about 15 years ago:

Lightbrushing involves openning the the lens shutter for long periods of time in a relatively dark room and applying light to your subject in much the same way that a painter would use an airbrush. Due to the need for long exposure times and multiple exposures, the technique is incompatible with digital capture.

Well, time moves on and look what it can do with modern digital. For an object I grabbed one of the few analogue cameras I have left. All black and chrome, this sort of thing can be tricky to light conventionally, but painting objects like that with light was part of photographic training back in the '60s (although then with b/w film and a single 500 W photoflood), and it'll be fun to play with it again using new technology.

If anybody else has old, interesting stuff in in their drawers, I say find out what it can do.

​

Broncolor Lightbrush, Nikon D800, Sigma 70 mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro, f/16, 25 sec.

[pnodrog]

Interesting, the lightbrush looks like fun but how long is the lead? Are you going to try and fit a digital back the Hasselblad or will it just become a family heirloom?

[oleleclos]

The lead is about 3 metres - and otherwise as long as the extension lead you fit

The Broncolor Lightbrush is not very powerful and therefore not suited for large objects as the exposure times would become very long, but it's fine for still lives. The lightbrush that started the 1990s craze was called Hosemaster and was a much bigger and hugely expensive piece of kit with the flash unit housed in a box and the light being fed to light wands via fibre optics. See http://photocorylum.wordpress.com/20...ainting-101-2/

No, I've never been tempted to fit a digital back to my Hassies, both because they are not full format (so my beloved 40mm Distagon would become a not very exciting 55 mm equivalent etc.) and because they are ridiculousluy expensive for what they do.

That's why I bought the D800, and since I got that I have been selling my medium and large format analogue kit. This is one of the last bits left. I don't believe in turning old technology into heirlooms and besides, it's fetching more money on the second hand market than I spend on new kit