VoiceOfEmerika » photography

More on the still front

admin — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 20:08:07 +0000

I’m going through some old stuff and looking for interesting blended stills. I will most likely just add them to this post as I get them done.

This is from a movie I was never able to finish. It’s the only scene that never moved fast enough to be interesting. I wrote some code to skip over frames in order to speed things up, but it’s not working yet. In the meantime, I love this.

Clouds at Sunset as a still

admin — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 21:54:04 +0000

I’ve been using the blending in movies sparingly, but I really love the effect in stills. This took about six hours on my laptop and I think it’s pretty nice. Notes: The sunlight across the ocean was never so strong in any single image. The cranes, ships and whatnot really benefited from the blending as well. I think the ocean takes on a nice quality, though not spectacular.

Enjoy-

A waterfall picture

admin — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 21:57:33 +0000

This is a blend of about 80 frames. It’s my favorite of this type so far. It took about 8 hours to process.

This is waterfall we stopped by during our Siyeh Bend to Sunrift Gorge hike in Glacier Park. I didn’t bring a tripod so I found a solid place on the rock to set the camera down. That and a little cropping worked fine.

A Chicago city street with no people?

admin — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 17:04:05 +0000

This is more what I had in mind. This was only about fifteen minutes or a little less. Clearly another fifteen minutes and there would have been no evidence of people or cars.

More blending

admin — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 20:43:12 +0000

When Karen and I were in Chicago, we took these pictures at Grant Park. I intended the kind of blending you see here when we took them. It’s not exactly what I had hoped for. I sort of thought the people might become completely invisible. Too many people, too much of the time, here for that. I do hold out for the idea to work (to some degree) better when the moving objects are more sparse.

Nonetheless:

(click for larger version)

The first frame by itself.

Two frames blended.

Five frames blended.

Ten frames blended.

Sixteen frames blended.

Thirty two frames blended. (I guess the people are disappearing. Well, the ones with a pulse anyway.)

Things are progressing. I need to start working on a movie using this technique.

Success!

admin — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 17:18:11 +0000

I rewrote the blending program and it’s looking good so far. Well, at least I think so. When you’re writing code you know something is wrong when things look too complicated and you know things are right when everything looks simple. The blending code looks really simple now. Also, it supports n images.

I think we have all seen those cool pictures of a stream looking all soft and fuzz in the water and crisp everywhere else. Usually these also have a sense of darkness. That’s because of the limitations of film. Unless you are using some strong filters you have to do this in very dim light. I suspect you get a similar feeling with filters. Anyway… –drum roll– Here’s my first example of using digital blending to create this type of a picture in broad daylight.

Click on the image to see a much larger version.

More to come

time-lapse with simulated long exposure

admin — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:32:11 +0000

I read about people blending several bracketed images taken in quick succession to create visually enhanced images. This gave me the idea of taking long exposure photos and making that into a movie.

Unfortunately, I am limited by the hardware I have. I am testing blending photos to simulate long exposures. There is a lot of software available that will blend two images. Nothing I can find will blend N images. I had to write something myself, but it went quickly.

Oddly, when I started this, getting the camera to wait between photos was the problem. Now I think I need more frequency.

So far I am ambivalent about the results. Like a lot of things, the source material has to be appropriate. Which really means that if I can’t get the proper frequency this technique won’t work.

Though the sample images here look pretty good.

It’s fascinating to watch the way this first image washes out as sequential images are added in.

Two image blend

Three image blend

Eight image blend

The more change there is in an area, the more ghostlike its appearance. (See how the water is getting fuzzed — especially look at the difference from the first image to the last.)

Fourteen image blend

I notice the image seems to lighten (brighten) over time. I wonder if I have a bug in my code? I guess I should look a the source images too.