Magic with Light
The Aurora Light Painters strive to create an incredible visual experience. Through the combined talents of the troupe they create hauntingly delightful visual vignettes. They are always pushing, adding, and inventing new techniques to create shimmering and mysterious imagery.
We got to the quarter finals on Americas Got Talent, season 7 and we were hailed as spectacular.
Light painting is an innovative and magical photographic technique. The images have a dreamlike, futuristic feel.
We transformed the basement of Julian and Jackie's house into a Victorian parlor where an incredible number of fun and spooky effects were set up to delight the more than 400 children who made their way through the experience. From interviews with a gloomy spirit down a haunted hall to a joke-telling disembodied head, we found we had incredible fun working together on artistic and highly technical projects.
Our Troop Leader, Julian Cash, is a renowned portrait photographer, who began light painting in childhood, and has made a career of it. Julian's 25+ years of experience in this medium were the original inspiration for our act. When Julian heard America's Got Talent were in town, he floated the idea of forming a light painting troupe, and we enthusiastically agreed. Our original Aurora team consists of Julian Cash, Jackie Cash, Eso, Jett Atwood, Lisa Eller, and Ron Halbert.
We don't digitally create the images. The effects are created by "light painting" - that is, moving colored light in the dark.
Light Painting as a technique has existed since the invention of the camera. The first photographers quickly discovered that a camera with an open shutter will show the path of light in a dark room. In the most famous example of this technique, a photojournalist handed Pablo Picasso a lightbulb and asked him to draw in the air. While several members of our troupe have light painted with both film and digital cameras for years, light painting with a digital video camera has only recently become possible.
The handmade aspect of our work is why we emphasise that these are not simply "computer graphics". It takes quite a bit of effort and speed to make these pictures dance before your eyes. We hope you enjoy seeing our images even half as much as we enjoy creating them in this exciting new medium!