Home Depot Week: Continuous Light Sources

Fortunately there are now enough people in the world who would like to be able to blind someone with a flashlight to where we can get a killer light-painting source for next to no money.

Most hardware stores will have a good selection of rechargeable, one-million-candlepower+ spotlights at very reasonable prices. Amazon has them, too.

There's even a twenty million candlepower light at HD. Just in case you need to signal someone on, say, Jupiter.

They plug into the wall or your car. Charge 'em up and you are good to head out into the night.

John Moran used one in the photo from this article, and I just saw a cool 1MM-candlepower light painting photo pop up in the pool a couple days ago.

Tips:

• These are usually tungsten balanced. So you can get your camera to tungsten (making other ambient daylight go blue) or put a "CTB" gel over the flashlight to make it daylight balanced.

• For heaven's sake, don't just stand there at your tripod and nuke the scene. That's pretty much the same as on-camera flash. Walk around into the background (stay out of your photo) and define your subject from different directions. You can make a black cardboard tunnel gobo to hide the light if you have to sneak in there, too.

-30-