These images are my attempts at applying the techniques of my two precedents into my own images of the original photoshoot I had. I found that the first image which is trying to create a gradient of time across the image was quite difficult primarily because I do not have equal times between each photograph, but rather they were taken randomly. However it is clear to see that it is a day time to night time image.  

 This image below is me using the same technique of a gradient but outwards from a particular element in the scene.I found the two buildings in the centre of the image to be the main feature in the photographs, therefore I focused in on them. But once again I don't believe I had enough photos to make a clear and interesting gradient, but rather it is unsuccessful as the building looks like it is the only part which is daylight. 

This image below I applied what happened above to the image again, attempting to make some aspects of the image to appear as though they are in daylight where as others are at night. I thought this may be good to lead on from my previous project, creating an illusion in the space.  Once again I have got not enough variety of photos to create something interesting here. Another thing with this image is that it is difficult to cut out certain aspects such as trees and it is clear that I have used a layer mask. What would help these images become successful is something to frame each element, to make it easy to cut out without making it obvious it has been photoshoped.

Day to Night Series by Stephen Wilkes

Through looking at more time lapse photography I found this series by Stephen Wilkes. Much like the series by Fong Qi Wei this one creates a gradient over the image using time, but what is fascinating about these is that it reads as one single image. Stephen Wilkes has merged/overlaid his photographs in way that you cannot tell. The series by Fong Qi Wei has obvious cuts and panels but these images creates a clean image where there is a simple transition between day to night without interruption anywhere in the image.

This series focuses in on iconic cities and are mesmerising to look at. I find also that they are also entirely about the transition of time, there is not a single element on the image which is the focus but rather it reads as a whole, as well as shows the differences that time creates in the scene.

Something else I have gathered from these images is the light qualities. The night shots contain a warm white light and coloured lights whereas the daytime images all maintain a cool crisp natural light which helps to create that contrast between day and night.

New Yorks, Time Square

Santa Monica Pier, California

Flat Iron Building, New York

Merging photos

In this image I attempted Fong Qi Wei's technique of merging the images with a series of panels. There is a lot going on in this image, therefore I found it difficult to focus in on one area. After discussions with my tutor, I agree that this techniques is not necessarily showing different times in the space but rather that the space has different times. What I get from this is the fact that the image isn't about time but about the scene. Putting the image together, not focusing on an order of time, but rather a particular element of the scene makes it about the image rather then the times captured in the image. 

Weekly Task: Testing Shutter Speed, high vs low

After playing with the shutter speed I now know how the exposure comp. works on a canon camera. I have already done a combination of these kinds of images which can most likely bee seen in my contact sheets. The images below however show a real difference. The first has an shutter speed of 1"6 making it quite bright, while the second image has a shutter speed of 1/13. 

Shutter speed: 1"6

Shutter speed: 1/13

I have learnt through photographing with my camera that at night and during the day the shutter speed needs to change in order to take a photo with an appropriate amount of light. If the image with a shutter speed of 1"6 was dimmer, but lit with smaller lights, much like a city scape it would be more successful. 

Putting Photos together

These were quite interesting. I would like to try to do a couple more things with these photos, but these here are all the photos merged together. The top one is each one overlaying each other. I did not really like the effect of it though. I think it was due to the lack of change in the images. However in the next one I nudged the images in photoshop to give it a sense of movement or change. 

Time: Photoshoot 1

Set up a camera outside my window. Am lucky to have a pretty nice view, and I found these really interesting. These photos were taken from about 5:00pm Thursday, to 9:00pm Friday. No real set duration as I was not always at home. These were taken on full manual mode and I found I had to play with the ISO and shutter speed throughout the day as it would be to bright during the day and to dark at night. I really like the effects i got however, especially when the moon was out, or a plane flew by. A couple of them came out a tad blurry too. Not sure why as it was sitting on a tripod.

Time as a dimension by Fong Qi Wei

I love thses images! It is such a simple image, which was only taken over a time span of 2-4 hours but the technique that Fong Qi Wei used in combining his photos is beautiful and really achieves focus on one particular aspect. his lines, or panels, of photos act as a gradient reaching one single point. There is also no true order to his composition, in terms of timeframe, but rather he treated it as a piece of art composing it to create balance and harmony. 

He discusses time as a dimension and talks of how photos record time as you are creating a 'snapshot' of something. Here though it is more then a snapshot but instead has depth, a series of events, a narrative. I think its interesting to as he treats time as a dimension of width and length. Using it to decipher what length of the photo should be cut out and placed into the image.

For more of his photographs http://fqwimages.com/time-dimension/

Idris Kahn: Time-lapse artwork.

I guess you would call this a time lapse? It appears he would take an image of the same feature over and over again and then overlay each photo to create an almost skeletal image. I find there to be something beautiful and equally unnerving about these images as he takes a normal every day object and overlays it to break it down to its most solid lines. Like deconstruction in a way. I find that this technique also gives the objects movement.

This is a technique I am interested in, but I am not sure how it would look with colour? Or possibly if the image moved? I am also positive that the same result couldn't be achieved with a journey as the same lines would not be maintained. This is something I would like to try however. Taking a series of photos and overlapping them could create something very interesting.

Homage to Bernd and Hilla Beacher, 2007

Digital bromide print mounted on rag board

86.4 x 76.2 cm

St. Paul's, London, 2012

Digital silver bromide mounted on 4 ply museum board and Dibond

76.5 x 101.5 cm

Bukingham Palace, London, 2012

Digital silver bromide print mounted on 4 ply museum board and Dibond

76.5 x 101.5 cm

After doing a little bit more digging into Idris Kahn I found this image below which shows a trip he took in 2003 where he combined each of his photos into one. This has the same language as the other ones but answers my questions about the subject matter and the use of colour. This one is very interesting and different to the others. All though you can see shapes and figures they are not defined and I am suddenly curious as to what i am looking at.

Every...photograph whilst travelling in Europe, 2003

Digital chromgenic print mounted on aluminium

71.1 x 73 cm

Weekly Task: 100 Photos, 100 Steps

Weekly Task 100 photos over 100 steps
Uploaded using I-movie. 0.1 second duration between photos. This was very interesting as it does look like someone moving but it truly shows that I was obviously not holding the camera steadily.

Proposal For Project 2: Time

For my second project I would like to propose a time-lapse, but through the use of photos rather then a stop motion. After researching potential precedents I found a few which I was really interested in. 
Idris Kahn is very interesting and I love the way he takes a large number of photographs of the same object and then merges them into a single image. Another is the 'Time is a dimension' series by Fong Qi Wei. He would take photos of the same place continuously and merge them into one; but combining them in a significant way which focuses the viewers eye on a particularly interesting part of the scene.

I want to merge photographs of a object, space or journey to show a change in time using similar techniques. This will require a good subject which changes often enough and when merged together will draw attention to certain points in time, slowing down the time-lapse as the viewer begins to break it down. I am unsure however which technique to use for this. Idris Kahn overlay his photos one over the other, whereas Fong Qi Wei would cut his images and then merge them into one, revealing a broken version of the scene. I will however for now continue to do more research and attempt to find a good subject matter for the photos. 

Panorama

Quite a long panorama, but my first attempt looking out the windows of the dinning room at my flat. The tripod I used is my own but it doesn't seem to have a function which allows me to spin the camera. For this panorama in some areas the perspective was adjusted slightly, possibly from the fact that I had to loosen or tighten my cameras hold on the tripod in order to turn the view. It was quite fun to make though!

Final Images

These are my final images in sequence. My proposal was to create an imaginary space from an existing space. These photos create an illusion of a wall and ground using an existing wall and stairwell. Each of the photos was taken during the day with the aperture priority setting. 

The point of the sequence is to slowly reveal, or offer hints that the photograph has been flipped. The materials of the stairs help with the illusion as concrete is a material that can be used for both floors and walls. The portrait (turned landscape) photos also help to stretch out the space, creating the misconception of height in the space, and creating a unique scale which has no regard to the true space. 

The first photograph in the sequence is the closest focusing in on the corner of the concrete panels, the next is more focused on the ground plane and the bottom edge of the panels. The third and fourth images are quite similar in scale but the fourth one reveals more open space with light coming from around the corner (or below) making the viewer want to move towards it. The fifth photo is open to the sky as the lighting is in fact brighter, and as seen as a ledge that the viewer can walk across, but in the open green space below there are indications deception of the image in the grass and tree branches. The final image still maintains the misconception but again the tree in the background of the image is viewed as being flipped.

Final Photoshoot Contact Sheet

These are the contact sheets of my final photoshoot. I decided to return back to my final site and stick with it as it created the best photos for what I wanted to achieve. Also I felt that using only one site would create a much better series of photographs. The issue I was concerned with with using this site however was the fact that the photos could get quite repetitive. The key would be to come up with a narrative. I have decided to take the viewer through the series by slowly making the illusion of space more obvious. This is achieved by zooming out from the space and by exposing more of the existing space.    

Descartes and Linear Perspective

As advised by my tutor, I began to look at linear perspective from the renaissance period and the philosophies of Rene Descartes. I studied art history in school so I find this stuff very interesting. The artists of the Renaissance period rediscovered the technique of perspective and applied it to their paintings. Previously it was all about representing the objects in the space and not the space itself.

 I remember from my classes that the people and the objects were drawn first and the space was added afterwards. At the beginning of the Renaissance this process was flipped to drawing out the space first and then adding the objects into the space. Space in paintings began to develop height, width and depth. Artist such as Brunelleschi began to represent objects at proper scale and in proportion and relation to one another. This 'geometrical space' was complimentary to the mathematical space created by Descarte's philosophy. 

In order for our perceptions of the world around us to move from confused forms to clear and distinct ideas which have the clarity of mathematical objects, corporeal bodies (nature of the physical body, not spiritual) must be interpreted by the mind with its innate geometry.

The photographs that I have explored have altered the space viewed but have maintained this common geometry created by perspective. What I get from reading about perspective and Descartes, and comparing them to my photographs, is that we always will perceive space the same but it is the objects (the corporeal bodies) that disrupt this change in perspective. If they do not fit within the space that is when the illusion of space is changed, and the viewer thinks "hold on, that does not work there." But the principles of perspective are the same.

1-point linear perspective in "View of Ideal City," painting by Piero della Francesca

Fifth photoshoot: What made the new site less successful?

With these photos I used the same techniques of formal portrait photography, I also avoided any open sky but as I said in the previous post they were less successful. I think the primary reasons are that the stairs themselves has a lot of debris, such as leaves and rubbish, sitting on them. It was also the size on the stairs, which made the angles limited in order to maintain the illusion. It was also the materiality of the stairs. It is un common to have brick as a flooring material as seen in the top three photos. The floor also contains graffiti which is also an uncommon feature. Overall these photos are created using the same technique that the others are but small features to the site itself disrupt the illusion. I decided to therefore return to the war memorial to see what else I could do there.  

More stairs...and then back to the original site.

The next stairs I looked at were close to my original site so they were easily accessible. They were also a lot smaller and not as well maintained. Here I really tried to stick with portrait photography and keeping the exposed sky out of shot. I find that the photos of these stairs were not as successful and I think that was primarily due to there materials and size. I then went back to the war memorial and took a few more photos.

Best photos from the different sites

The two images above are stairwells from Hannahs factory. One at the base of the building one a fire escape on the side of the building. These images, although interesting, confirmed what I said earlier about flipping from portrait to landscape, so that the view of the 'ground plane' is greater and the 'walls panels' seem higher, altering the scale. The length of the ground as apose to the height of the wall is stronger as it gives the observer a clearer view of where they are standing in the space. I also like how it alters the sense of scale as you do not know how tall the space is. The first image is enclosed and is stronger then the second, but again the space seems small due to the orientation of the photo. The hand rail tI though at first glance looked like a kerb, but after looking at it it becomes obvious that it is in fact a hand rail, due to the fixtures to the wall, disrupting the illusion of space.
The second photo I found interesting, and at first glance, again, it looks like a space; but once you begin to dissect the photo you see that the features on the ground are in fact pipes and the scaffolding above is the handrails of the stairs.

 This one is similar to the one above it as it has odd features on the ground floor. It also shows a small section of the stairwell which means it is going away from my concept.
   

 This photo is interesting and I would have liked to have discovered this through more exploration earlier; but it is the first feature like this that I have photographed. Above the fire escape stairs there was a small ledge with exposed floor joists which, when flipped, looked like wall framing. This is something that I would have liked to explore more, what else could I manipulate to look like a wall and floor? Also, what I could possibly manipulate to look like stairs? These are definately things I would have liked to look at more if I had more time for this project.

Fourth Photoshoot: Other Stairs

For this photoshoot I went to two hidden stairwells behind Hannah's Factory just off Cuba Street. One was at the base of the building at the back entrance of the shops on cuba street. While the other was a fire escape leading up about three floors. As well as looking at the stairs I picked a couple other spaces there which have repetition, and thought I would attempt to flip those. I took a couple of the bars at a back window of a car park and a couple of the bottom floor joist of a ledge above the stairs I was photographing.