Best Flashlights for Light Painting Photography 2025

The Best Flashlights for Light Painting Photography 2025 article is now available on my website. This buying guide reviews the best flashlights, torches, cube lights, LED panel lights, COB video lights, and headlamps for light painting, night, urbex, astro, and low level landscape lighting photography. Now in its 9th year, this buying guide is the most trusted source of information on flashlights for light painting photographers and the only buying guide that covers a wide range of light painting systems. The article will also be updated throughout 2025 when new lights are released and reviewed.

I’m always happy to answer any questions on this topic!

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" Convoy S21E (1150-1800lm, 18650, $20-$24)"

“or SST40 versions for maximum lumens”
I think XHP50.3 is better for lumens

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Dont they have special lights for photographers?

It is, though the candela/lumen is worse, so the SST40 version is most optimal for saber like tools. These articles aren’t written for flashlight experts so I’m trying to keep things fairly simple.

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Light painting is a niche within long exposure photography. There are 2 main aspects:

  1. Creating light trails - which generally requires specialist torches, or other LED devices.
  2. Illumination - where is scene is illuminated during a long exposure - this can be done with flashlights, or increasingly with portable COB video lights or panel lights.

The latter has a crossover with photography lights, which tend to be more studio based and not portable. Portable photography lighting such as 40-60W COB video lights and pocket RGBWW panel lights have improved a lot in terms of brightness in the last year.

OK, I can’t argue what is better for photographers, but I guess we can both agree on the first part of my comment: S21E is not a 18650 light, it’s 21700 :slight_smile: .

Thanks for picking that up. Now corrected.

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Impressive article!

Here is a small typo that I noticed: “FireflyLite NOV-Mu V2S (…) 9xFFL391A 5000K 95CRI would be my recommended LED option.” It should read FFL351A with a 5 instead of FFL391A.

Furthermore, the manufacturer of lithium-ion cells is spelled Molicel with one l, not Molicell.

Finally, regarding the Anduril 2 UI, it might be of interest to you that “Momentary Strobe Mode”, 5C from Strobe / Mood Modes, is specially visualized in this diagram of mine:

Thanks. I’ve made those typo changes, and thanks for your work on the Anduril diagram.

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The typo details can get tricky at times. :grin: There were several instances of “Molicell” in your article, and when I just checked, two were still remaining: “Molicell M35A” and “Molicell M50A” (the high current ones had been corrected, but not the high capacity ones).

The battery and charger section was moved from the 2024 battery and charger buying guide (I decided it was no longer worth having 2 articles) and the spelling of molicel was never picked up. I’ll be writing a new li-ion safety article when I get the chance.

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It’s been a while since I’ve done any light painting, but I look forward to using my new FFL mules when I do.

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