February 16, 2019
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Artist lights up the night sky by using a drone to draw elaborate shapes in 15 minutes
An artist has created elaborate symbols with his drone to draw them in under fifteen minutes using the expanse of the Colorado sky as his canvas. Giant light paintings including Pokemon characters Pikachu and Ellie, a perfect outline of a giant cube, the famous Batman symbol and the Broadway show Hamilton's logo lit up the night sky.
Artist and photographer Russell Klimas uses a Lumecube, a powerful LED light, which he attaches to his drone to create bright, white streaks in the sky depicting the images.
He also uses Google Earth and a navigation app called Litchi to create detailed flight plans for making waypoints to make the intricate paintings at the clearest point in the sky. Time lapse footage also shows him making the symbols in the sky in real time.
He said: 'A few months ago I was inspired to try and see what shapes I could create while attaching a Lumecube to my drone. I’d seen people like Phil Fisher do shapes in the sky manually and was extremely impressed but didn’t have the time to learn how to fly shapes manually. So instead I scoured the net on drone apps that could make things like this possible, and this was my discovery.'
He bought the Littchi program, an app which allows you to fly your drone and take photos, for $10 from the app store, available on Android or Apple.
To capture the entire sky, Mr Klimas sets up a digital camera with a very wide lens (12mm) so he can use the entire area in the sky. He uses a very slow shutter speed to create the light painting effect.
Mr Klimas says he prefers manually putting in the waypoints one at a time instead of drawing lines for them because it allows him to draw the image in much more detail.
He said: 'A shape can consist of a few way points or hundreds to thousands. My current record when writing this article is 633 for Santa and his reindeer but you can definitely have much more.'
He keeps a close eye on what section of the figure the drone is flying in as he needs to cover the lens for any parts he does not want in the final image. This is because the LumeCube is switched on during the entire flight.
'If you are creating a shape that has any gaps in it like Pikachu then you’ll need to know either when to cover and uncover your lens or you can change your Point of Interest of your drone. I attach my light to the back and the light will turn so your camera can’t see it,' he wrote in a blog post.
Extracted from: www.dailymail.co.uk
