More Time in One Picture

The work of Alan Grinberg with his Sunset over the Pacific (see my post of 13^th March) really got me thinking. It’s a great picture. For my Day-to-Night in one picture, my subject was the back of a large house (see my post of 16^th March) with a smooth transition from day to night, but I thought I would do another picture, with a different subject, using a highly-segmented image like Grinberg.

We don’t live by the sea, but we do live near a Motorway (M3). Instead of the glow of the sky at sunset over the sea, maybe it should be the glow of the sunset over car tail and headlamps. But just opening your shutter and letting the car tail and headlamps smear has been done too many time before – like the image below. This is not very original.

My idea was to shoot the same scene of the motorway every few minutes as it got dark, so that there would be a glow in the sky at first from the setting sun going through to darkness. The car headlights would streak more and more as the exposure increased with the increasing darkness. I would then segment the images as in a Ginberg picture.

When I got down to the bridge over the motorway and looked at the scene, I realised my original idea wasn’t so good. The road and the lights disappearing into the distance weren’t going to suit the segmented style. So I tried something different. Instead of shooting every 10 mins, I shot very rapidly by selecting the ‘high-speed shooting’ option on the camera I was using. I was shooting something like 20 pictures per second. I then merged all the pictures with Adobe Photoshop to create one final picture with the cars now shown not as streaks, but as a series of images one-after-the other. This captures time in quite a different way.  Three pictures created this way are shown below.

In the first two pictures Photoshop auto-aligned all the merged photographs very well. In the third picture, the original images are so dark, auto-align didn’t work, but still left me with a great picture. This one I really like.

I was really pleased with all the results. I am sure this technique has been done before, but I couldn’t find any images on the web like them. Hope you like them too.  

My Day-to-Night in one Picture

I thought that I would try to do a ‘day-to-night’ panorama in the style of Krzywinski. (see my post of 13^th March). But I didn’t have easy access to great photo positions overlooking a city. So I decided to shoot a wide building at ground level with windows that light up as darkness falls. I chose a large house with a conservatory, but the rear garden was steeply sloping, so the camera angle was quite steep. I couldn’t get the house in one shot even with a wide-angle lens, so I did it in three shots, with the idea that I would use the Photoshop panorama tool to join up the three shots.

I started to take pictures late afternoon (4 pm early March) with a strong, low sun lighting up the bushes and a palm in the garden. As it started to get dark, the lights in the house were turned on in all the rooms at the rear of the house. I took a set of pictures every 10 minutes until it was getting quite dark (6.40pm). I had 16 sets of 3 pictures.

The idea was to create 16 panoramas and then slice up each panorama into 16 sections. One slice would be taken from each panorama to make a new day-to-night panorama.  Slice 1 would be from panorama 1 (sunlit) and slice 16 would be from panorama 16 (night).  I started to do this but the results were looking rather odd and Photoshop wasn’t so good at joining the slices up. I realised that what would look better would be something much simpler – three time segments that covered the three sections of the house.  The right hand side of the house would be in daylight, the central part at dusk and the left hand side at night. So I selected the appropriate shots from the 16 sets of pictures (shot 1 picture set 1, shot 2 picture set 9 & shot 3 picture set 16) and joined with the panorama tool. I made some adjustments with the transform tool to allow a little for the steepness of the camera angle and the crop tool to give me a neat-edged picture. I did some minor cut-and-paste edits and it was done. Well I hope you managed to follow all that! The result is shown below.

I may still do a bit of work on the right hand side of the picture to improve the distorted (by camera angle and Photoshop panorama tool) horizontals. The window top , gutter line and roof line might look better if they were parallel.

Now what I have noticed in the other day-to-night pictures that I have seen, is that time goes from left to right in the picture. Mine goes from right to left. Does this matter, does this feel odd? What do you think? Answers to my blog please.

Camera:

Olympus E-410 DSLR, 14mm lens (28mm, 35mm equivalent), tripod mounted.

Set at ISO 100. Night pic: 1.6 sec at f3.5. Dusk pic: 1/10 sec at f3.5. Daylight pic: 1/125 sec at f6.3.

Day to Night in one Picture

I have been looking at other ways that photographers capture time in one picture. I rather like those pictures that show a scene where one side of the picture is spring and the other is autumn or winter. A year may seem a long time for a picture, but I found the photographer Michael Wesely specialises in photographs that take several years! Well I can’t wait years or even one year, so I looked for people that capture a day in one picture. Martin Krzywinski, a Canadian biochemist and photographer, has taken some interesting day-to-night photographs. He has a passion for this sort of photography. I really like his panorama of Vancouver. The time each part of the picture was taken is shown at the top of the picture.

The final image captures a period of 3hrs 40 mins, but time is not even across the picture. Over half the image covers just half an hour as it was getting dark.  A total of 60 pictures were taken to create the final image. Another of his images is his dawn to dusk image of a bridge with a wide road over a river. Here he used just 16 pictures.

There seem to be a number of ways these pictures can be produced, but the easiest is to shoot a series of pictures of the scene over time and then select a strip from each picture – each strip being later in time than the previous one selected. You then join up the selected strips with a program like Photoshop.

I also liked the work of Alan Grinberg. Alan is a textile designer and photographer, who lives in California. He specialises in taking landscape photographs. His time pictures are rather different from Kryzwinski. He cuts his pictures into time strips, but joins the selected strips without any program to smooth the joins. The results can be amazing. His sunset over the Pacific Ocean is shown below.

I think all these day-to-night pictures are really interesting. They have given me some ideas for time pictures that I can create. Watch this blog for progress.

Sources of information and pictures

http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/fun/hdtr

http://www.alangrinberg.com/pacifica/page07/

http://www.wesley.org

In the Style of Sugimoto

After having done some research into Hiroshi Sugimoto (see my blog of 22^nd February), I decided that I would create my own Sugimoto cinema-style shot. But instead of a cinema I thought I would use our TV and lounge.

I set up the shot so that the TV would light up the fireplace and soft furniture. This meant that the TV is off centre in the picture. I was shooting with an Olympus E-410 DSLR on a tripod with the lens set at 14mm (28mm lens 35mm equivalent). I chose the smallest aperture (f22) and slowest film speed (ISO 100). The camera was set to manual focus. I did a number of exposures, but found that I was getting the effect I was looking for with an exposure of about 3 minutes. I shot the scene in RAW so I would able to make further adjustments to light levels in Photoshop.

When I downloaded the pictures onto my laptop, I was pretty pleased with the results, but with a bit of adjustment with Photoshop I found I could do even better. So the final light levels are about what they would have been had the exposure been for 4 minutes. I like the final result, but it doesn’t quite have the same eerie feeling as the Sugimoto original. So I thought that I could improve things by killing the colour and printing it in black and white. Both colour and B&W are shown below. Which one do you like? Which one gives that spooky feeling best? Answers to my blog please.

Websites Review

I have started to look at the good and bad sides of websites. I first thought about the sites that I like and why I like them.

One site that I use quite a lot is the Apple website (http://www.apple.com/uk ). I like looking at their stuff and what’s new. It is not just because of the cool technical stuff they are showing, but also the way it is displayed and the ease of getting around the site. The opening page is simple and clear and does not feel messy, yet there is plenty of information. I think the white background helps to give the uncluttered look. The pictures of the equipment they show are eye-catching – you feel you want to know more and go further into the site.

No matter how good the website looks or how good its content, it has to be easy to use, to get around and find what you are looking for. Many sites are annoying to use, because they have dead-ends and unclear instructions and links. I think you should be able to find what you want with only three or four few clicks of the mouse at most. I tried this out on the Apple UK site and found I got to the VGA adapter I was looking for in four clicks. So this passes my use-ability test!

Another site that I like is the one owned by Jonathan Pollock (http://www.jonathanpollock.com), a really superb still-life and food photographer. The opening page is so simple, but has a big impact. The photograph of the biscuit box with the biscuits alongside is just brilliant, but then the whole page reflects the colour of the box in the photograph. The simple, clear lettering of his name, contact details and the site contents are just right.

What is really good about the contents headings/links is when you run the mouse cursor over each link, the photographs on the page that you have selected are displayed in a series of mini-photo squares alongside the link. It is preview of what is to come – and you can select from the mini-photos if you wish. Navigation is really easy and interesting.

The Apple site is all about technical equipment and the Jonathan Pollock site all about good photography and advertising images. Other sites I use are just lots of information. So this is difficult to do without the site being confusing and boring, but the BBC website (http://www.bbc.co.uk) I think does it quite well. The opening page has a lot of information, but it is well organised with good images. To see the whole page you have to scroll down, which I am not so keen about, but that is a minor objection. The first thing you see on the opening page is a large colour picture showing a TV programme or a news item, but this picture can be changed by running your mouse cursor over other lead stories shown on the right hand side of the page. Below this are neat boxes for News, Weather, Sport etc – all easy to see and find. It’s rather like an electronic newspaper, complete with articles by leading BBC reporters. Again, the site has a white background, which I think works well if you have a lot of text and stuff. The articles that the reporters write have very simple layouts. It’s just text on a white background in well-spaced lines. The font used is Verdana, which has wide letters that are easy to read off the computer screen. Fonts such as Calibri or Verdana are easier to read off the screen than traditional fonts, such as Times New Roman, used in printed media.  Background images, colours and arty fonts may look good, but can you read the text easily and quickly? If the layout and design are getting in the way of reading and understanding the text, then I don’t think it can be good design.  In case you are wondering, this text is in Calibri 11pt.

Now we come to sites that I don’t like. I suppose I like well-constructed sites and leave the poorly designed ones alone if they don’t immediately appeal. I would only go further with those sites if I absolutely need information from the site. This says something about the importance of design. If you don’t get the design right, people are less likely to use your site. I don’t have a list of poor sites, but I looked around and came up with an example.

The site looks cluttered without giving much information. It isn’t even immediately clear what the site is about. The black background doesn’t help here. The text on the left is disjointed and not in a screen font. Illustrations are poor. The credit stuff text on the right is a bit small and the background is some sort of repeating (tiled) star-pattern, which looks very poor. I suppose the author doesn’t worry too much about design, he just wants to get his thoughts down. If you are into ‘Outcasts’ you may find the content interesting, but this site wouldn’t grab anybody’s attention if it was down to design alone.

So, what do these sites tell me about what I think makes a good website.

First of all there has to be interesting content –  with good  images, descriptions and information. Even if your design is great, people will soon tire of the site if it doesn’t have much to say. Then there is design. The layout and illustrations on the opening page need to be good, to give the feel of a user-friendly site with interesting content. You want people to feel they would like to go further into the site. The other pages also want to be well laid out with blocks of text easy to read. Finally there is the use-ability of the site. How easy is it to get around the site and how quickly can you get to where you need to go? Does it pass the four-clicks test?

Of course, all the above is just my opinion about what makes a good website. Someone else will probably have completely different views and think my thoughts are definitely odd.

Websites reviewed

1.     http://www.apple.com/uk

2.     http://www.jonathanpollock.com

3.     http://www.bbc.co.uk

4.     http://www.niknaksoldpeculiarblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/outcasts-episode-6-interesting-but-with.html