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