Recommended Gear

You already own enough to make a light painting: a phone, its torch, and a stack of books to rest it on. Do that first. What you learn from one evening in a dark room will tell you which of the things below you actually want.

There are no purchase links here and nothing on this page is sponsored. These are the categories worth knowing about, described so you can shop for them anywhere.

The light is the brush. It matters more than anything else you could buy.

Small LED torches. The most useful thing on this page. A tight, bright beam draws a clean, narrow trail, and a torch with adjustable focus lets you switch between a fine line and a broad wash. Buy two or three so you can work with more than one color without changing tools mid-shot.

Colored torches, or gels for the ones you have. The cheapest way to make a shot look intentional rather than accidental. A sheet of colored gel taped over a torch head costs almost nothing and works as well as a dedicated colored light.

LED wands and tubes. A line of light rather than a point, so one pass paints a wide ribbon. This is what makes those broad, sweeping curtains of color. Many are RGB and can change color partway through a stroke, which turns a single trail into a gradient.

RGB strips. Flexible, cheap, and easy to tape to something, a bike wheel, a hoop, a stick, a drone. Wrapping a strip around an object and spinning it is how a lot of the more elaborate light paintings are made.

Fairy lights and light ropes. Cheap, and unbeatable for texture. A handful of battery-powered fairy lights swung slowly produces a dense mesh of trails you could not draw deliberately.

Lasers. Distinctive and hazardous. Never point one at anyone's eyes, at an aircraft, or at a vehicle, and never at a mirror or window where it can come back at you. Check what is legal where you live, laser power limits vary by country and the strong ones sold online are often illegal to own. Point it away from people, at a surface, and treat it as the specialist tool it is.

Steel wool. Spectacular and genuinely dangerous, it throws burning metal in every direction. Fine grade wool in a whisk on a wire, lit and spun. If you try it: wear a long-sleeved non-synthetic top, gloves and eye protection; stand on bare ground or concrete with nothing dry anywhere near; have water to hand; never do it in a forest, a field, near a building or during a dry spell; and check local fire rules first. Take someone with you. The app has a Steel Wool capture mode because people do this, not because it is safe to improvise.

A long exposure records camera shake as faithfully as it records your light. This is the second thing to buy.

iPhone mounts, roughly $10 to $20. A solid mount stabilizes the shot and almost all of them have a tripod thread. Choose one that locks with a knob or a lever rather than a spring, in our experience spring-loaded holders are too risky and a phone can pop out of them easily. Many come bundled with a selfie stick or a small tripod, which is usually the better value.

Magic arms with clamps, roughly $10 to $50. An articulated arm with a clamp at one end lets you mount the phone to a railing, a door, a chair, a car window, anywhere there is an edge to grip. They adjust freely and lock in place. A tripod with a ball head does a similar job with more stability and less reach; between the two you can put the camera almost anywhere.

Camera rotators for panning timelapses, roughly $30 to $50. These sit on a flat surface or a tripod and turn the camera slowly over time. They are compatible with the phone mounts above, and they are one of our favorite tools for adding motion to a timelapse, the shot that moves while nothing in the app changes.

• A stronger light. Past a point, brighter just burns out to white and loses its color. Dimmer and more controllable beats brighter.
• A remote shutter. Siri already does this, hands-free, and can change settings mid-session too.
• Filters and lens attachments. The color grade in the app does more, is free, and is undoable.