Fotografic Memories: Memories, Music and Timelapse

Photographer Salman Ashrafi notes that in today's world, depending on what we do, we rarely find the time to just sit and observe everything that goes on around us. His movies, known as 'Fotografic Memories' represent Salmans' work to make up for this loss of time and we really like his technique of combining frames with timelapse and music as the first example below of Toronto demonstrates:

Downtown Toronto from Fotografic Memory on Vimeo.

The technique and concept can be adapted to any situation - below is the 'memory' of a bus ride in London comprised of 738 photographs:

BUS RIDE from Fotografic Memory on Vimeo.

Finally, Building and Clouds - Dubai:

BUILDINGS + CLOUDS from Fotografic Memory on Vimeo.

For more memories and information see fotograficmemory.com, it is well worth taking the time to explore the other work and clips on the site.

Extracts of Local Distance: A Unique Take on Architectural Photography

Countless fragments of existing architectural photography are merged into multi-layered shapes. The resulting collages introduce a third abstract point of view next to the original ones of architect and photographer - this is the concept behind Extracts of Local Distance.

Digital scans of analogue architectural photography form tiny pieces of a large resulting puzzle. The original pictures are being analysed and categorised according to their vanishing-points and shapes. Based on this analysis, slices are being extracted from the source image. These slices retain the information of their position corresponding to their original vanishing-point and thus form a large pool of pieces, ready to be applied to new perspectives and shapes.

The clip below provides a look at the process:


Extracts of Local Distance from STOESELTNTPRO on Vimeo.

Using the extracted image segments, it is now possible to form collages of originally different pictures with a new common perspective. In order to compose a collage, a perspective-grid is defined and a lining of matching image segments is being applied. The segments are not altered to match the frame but fitting ones are chosen from the sheer mass of possible pieces. By defining additional keywords which describe the content of the original photographs, the selection of segments used for the final composition can be influenced. Thus a contextual layer is added through the semantic linking with the source material.

The recompositions mix and match the views and perspectives of both the architect and the photographer with a third, newly chosen frame. The resulting fine-art prints are entirely unique, and represent a new take on architectural imagery.

Head over to http://www.localdistance.org/ for full details, especially the results page which has some stunning images.

HDR New York at Night

The image above grabbed our attention while searching for HDR City Images. Taken using 3 exposures which are then subsequently merged using Photomatix the photo by Paulo Barcello's is one of the best we have seen.

HDR is an interesting technique and one that we have been promising to do a tutorial on for a while. The weather in London is improving and with the booklet complete (more on that and availability/pricing next week after the new print run) we are ready to go and capture some shots for a 'how to'...

It is well worth visting Paulo's Flickr page to see the full size version of New York at Night.

HDR City Photographs: Tokyo

After our posts on HDR photographs of New York a quick update to point those interested to images of Toyko captured using the same technique...

See 10 Pictures of Tokyo Gotham using HDR.

A tutorial and sample files will follow as soon as the weather in London allows - it could be months ;)

HDR City Photographs

Our plans to capture High Dynamic Range (HDR) images in Hong Kong were put to rest due to mist and London seems to of been lost in drizzle for months. As soon as we get the right conditions a full tutorial will appear on the blog as its part of the forthcoming book.

In the meantime Stuck in Customs - unique photography for unique people have some stunning HDR images of New York.

It is well worth taking a look at the full set of photographs via the main Stuck in Customs page.