Photons probe the fireball of a heavy ion collision in a very particular way. They carry messages from the very early, non-equilibrium quark-gluon plasma phase - up to the very late phase of hadrons, and challenge theoreticians for decades. In this talk I will present our recent progress in implementing full leading order photon production in a partonic transport approach (BAMPS). We aim to understand the importance of the very early non-equilibrium photon production; for this regime partonic transport simulations are more suitable than hydrodynamic calculations. We compare systematically elastic and bremsstrahlung rates from the transport code to analytically known rates(AMY), and present results for transverse momentum spectra and elliptic
flow of direct photons.