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.