Time in one picture – with clocks!!!

Since capturing time in one picture is all about the passage of time, I thought that a most appropriate subject for my next pictures would be clocks – or parts of clocks.

I have always been fascinated by the long-case clock we have in our hall. It has a bright brass pendulum that gently swings side-to-side. Capturing the motion of the pendulum just as a blur didn’t seem too interesting, but capturing its motion in the same way as I captured the motion of the cars on the M3 (see my post of 27^th March) seemed to be a good idea.

For the motorway shoot I used the high speed shooting option on the camera (around 20 pictures per second) to create a series of pictures of the cars passing by in a short space of time. When all the pictures are overlaid on top of each other (using Photoshop) you see the motion of the cars as a series of individual images. I thought that using a similar technique with the pendulum, I could capture its motion also as a series of images.

Although I had hoped to have the results of this idea on the blog this week, I hit some problems which I am still working on. So unfortunately, it’s still work in progress, but I will let you know how it goes. I know you could just hold the pendulum in different positions on its swing and take a series of shots, but I didn’t think that this would give the effect I was looking for.   

While I was thinking about the pendulum, I also had another thought. How about showing a clock over a 12 hour period? But it wouldn’t be a smear of hands round the clock face like in a long exposure. I would take a picture at each hour and then combine the 12 shots. It is the same idea as the pendulum picture, but the time between each shot is an hour instead of a fraction of a second. The minute hand would always be pointing at 12, but the hour hand would show at all the numbers round the dial. So that is what I did. I used two strobes to light the clock face. The 12 shots I took were combined with Photoshop to give the picture below.

I really like the result and think that it has something of a surreal feel about it. You can imagine Man Ray might have done something like it.  I would like you to think that this picture did take 12 hours to make, but of course it didn’t. I just moved the clock hands round manually. Bit of a cheat.

I did some research into this idea on the internet, but again was surprised to find little that helped. I can’t believe that the above idea hasn’t been done before. Anyway, hope you think it’s fun too.