Take some of the most alien landscapes on our planet, illuminate them in unnatural ways with the help of drones and the resulting images look like they can’t possibly be real. You can gaze at photo after photo in Rueben Wu’s ‘Lux Noctis’ series with a skeptical eye, certain that there’s digital trickery involved, but the the fact is, the ability to fly bright lights over darkened scenes allows us to see them in a whole new way.

Some of the mountains have halos; others seem like they’re lit on a soundstage for a motion theater production. The angles of the light, with no source apparent in the images, almost lend the photographs a miniaturizing tilt-shift effect. Wu takes inspiration from “ideas of planetary exploration, 19th century sublime romantic painting, and science fiction” for the series of award-winning landscapes.

Wu uses a light by Fiilex mounted on a GPS-equipped 3DR Solo UAV to achieve these effects. You can follow him on Instagram @itsreuben to catch fresh works as they roll in.

“In my visual work, I am driven not just by the urge to create imagery, but by a desire to explore new places as if they were unknown territory, constantly open to serendipity and with an eye for the unnoticed and the hidden,” reads Wu’s website. “Photographs, like music, can create an echo of a time and a place. To me, my images are more than pictures. They are fragments of memory and imagination.”

The strange glowing figures in these images are so complex, you might think they’re screenshots from a digital animation, or created in Photoshop – but there’s no computer-based trickery here. Just the same long exposure techniques light artists have been using for decades to create and capture ethereal compositions, albeit applied in an unusually creative manner.

Hannu Huhtamo’s bizarre shapes glow against twilight landscapes and abandoned interiors, often looking somewhere between a plant and an alien insect. They sprout up in snowy fields, appear from inside giant teacups at theme parks or take shape in darkened living rooms.

A musician by training and hobbyist photographer, the Finnish artist first experimented with lighting techniques when taking promotional photos for a death metal band and deciding he wanted a long-exposure pentagram made with the flame of a lighter. Years later, when he met light artist Janne Parviainen and got a look at his work, Huhtamo decided to revisit the technique from a new angle.

All of his work is created ‘SOOC’ or straight out of the camera, and he uses no special light equipment other than El-Wire (electroluminescent wire) and modified LED flash lights. “Darkness is my canvas and the light is my brush,” he says in this behind-the-scenes video produced by Great Big Story.

Roombas, those little robotic vacuum cleaners, zoom around cleaning the floor without requiring you to lift a finger. Hitting furniture and walls, they simply back up and move in another direction. But what if you mount them with colored LED lights and take long-exposure photographs of their movements? A Flickr pool called Roomba Art displays some of the trippy results that are possible.

Tobias Baumgartner, Marcus Brandenburger, Tom Kaphans, Alexander Kroeller and Chrstiane Schmidt of the IBR Algorithm Group and Braunschweig University of Technology mounted different colored LED lights on a swarm of seven Roombas as part of a “Roomba Art” picture series.

They set up their cameras in a dark room and let the Roombas loose at the same time, allowing them to zoom and collide at will.

Other participants in the photo pool, like zim2411, mounted their cameras to the ceiling or experimented with different lighting effects. Some of the images, like the one below by Steve Doll, resemble tapestries of light, with the lines overlapping and intertwining.

See the whole set at Flickr.