Almost spring?

If you live in Anaheim, Aruba, Australia, Angola or any of the other literally thousands of places where it's not cold in March, please ignore the below.

Can you feel it? The days are getting longer. The nights are getting warmer. And each day your pixelstick calls to you from its January hiding spot in the closet:

"Get out of the house! Use me! Use me!"

We highly recommend listening to pixelstick's suggestion - we have. We've been shooting more and more (tutorials! image packs! stuff we're doing just for fun!) and falling in love with pixelstick all over again. We know it can be a bit difficult to line up availability with reasonable conditions in the dead of winter but ladies and gentleman winter is almost over.

In the below newsletter you'll find some great shots from some exciting new pixelstickers, some tips and bug fixes, a spotlight on one of our favorite Night Photo groups, and if you look very hard, maybe even the meaning of life. Thanks for reading!

Duncan & Steve
Bitbanger

Animation Tutorial #1

There are many ways of animating with pixelstick, and over the next few weeks we'll be touching on all of them. But for our first animation tutorial we'll focus on one of the easier methods involving a single bmp only - a style we lovingly refer to as "wigglevision". Check out the full tutorial on our site and stay tuned for our continuing series.

New website!

Many of you already know that we launched a new website for pixelstick in mid-February. We think it does a much better job of demonstrating what pixelstick is and how people can use it, and it even gave us a chance to take a few much slicker product shots. Check it out!

Countless Thousands pixelstick music video

A rather impressive undertaking using pixelstick in concert with a variety of techniques to achieve a lyrics hyperlapse. The final product is one of the best lyric music videos we've seen with pixelstick to date. Check out the whole thing on youtube. Well done, Countless Thousands!

Bug Spray

Bad news! We've identified a bug that causes the pixelstick to cancel firing in the middle of an image.

Good news! We fixed the bug. If you're experiencing this behavior on certain images, mosey on over to the firmware page and update to version 1.2

Pixeltricks - Gif to Stick

The web is full of excellent animated gifs ripe for the pixelsticking. But how to get those beautiful gifs on your pixelstick if pixelstick is looking for multiple bmp files instead of a single gif file? With photoshop, it's a simple six step process that involves opening the gif, resizing and rotating it, and then exporting it out as an image sequence.

1. Go to Image->Resize and select 200px height. Select Bilinear to avoid the faint white border around the image
2. Go to Image->Rotate and select 90deg Counter Clockwise
3. Go to File->Export->Render Video
4. Select Photoshop Image Sequence from the center dropdown and BMP as the format.
5. Click the Settings button next to format to make sure you have Windows 24-bit selected.
6. Click the Render button. You're done!

To see a larger version of this gif click here.

New Ribbon Packs!

Our new roomy workspace has allowed us to more quickly play around with new types of images and methods. Anyone who follows us on Instagram has seen some of these popping into their feed. Check out the Image Packs page on our website to download three new ribbon sets - a series of riffs on our original rainbow image, some volumetric ribbons that have depth and shape in contrast to our typical flat stripes, and finally some slick glitch art.

Got big ideas but not much photoshop/illustrator game? Suggest an image pack here!

Featured Artists: Night Crawlers

When the sun sets on Los Angeles, the people at Night Crawlers grab their GoPros and hit the streets. The results are often stunning and never boring. The Night Crawlers have a real knack for blending pixelstick, action photography, and traditional lightpainting.

Check out More of Night Crawlers' awesome work at their Instagram.

Until next time!

Thanks for reading! We love email - can't get enough of the stuff. So if you have any problems, questions, comments, concerns, ideas for what you'd like to see us shoot or talk about, or just want to talk photography and no one else is awake at 3am but us, you can always drop us a line. We're here.

Duncan & Steve
Bitbanger