In the past year, we've seen a steady stream of ingenious light painting—from designs crafted with strange objects to BERG London’s iPad painting to creating ghostly or corpse-like creatures. Now, Terence Chang has come up with a rather practical use for light painting.
Chang has used the technique to track the flight patterns at San Francisco International Airport, creating tangled webs of light in more colors that ensnare the night sky and hold it hostage. As the series of photographs develops, we start to get a sense of the 'clean' take-offs and landings and the number of planes populating certain regions of the sky, especially during a December rush hour (below).The streams of light, surprisingly solid against the San Francisco skyline, almost seem like parts of some ethereal creature reaching its tentacles out into the sky, grasping for something perpetually out of reach. Seeing the hustle and flow of air traffic visualized in this way reminds us how much of the day-to-day energy we expend and are enveloped in goes unseen, (such as wifi and mobile networks perhaps). It also reminds us of the gorgeous flight mapping data visualizations by Aaron Koblin:All images courtesy of Terence Chang