art thought

[egypturnash]

Not having a digital camera handy, I don't have the core tool for this one. I'd try it if I did.

Go to the middle of your city on a beautiful, sunny day. The populated, people-filled areas. Bring your camera. You'll probably want a tripod, maybe even a remote shutter-release cable.

Set it down and take a ton of photos of one location. Fairly rapid succession so they've all got pretty much the same lighting conditions.

Now bring them home and stack them all up in Photoshop. Erase every person. Erase every passing car. Erase every reflection of them.

Empty the place of life. Plants stay. But do birds? Do cats? Squirrels? That's up to you, I suppose.

To make the trick obvious I guess you'd want to do a series of this, that includes shots of famously always-busy locations. Somewhere you'd hope most viewers would see something wrong in.

Comments

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

I've seen a similar effect achieved without the use of Photoshop, by an artist who used exceedingly slow film, a small aperture, and a very long exposure. Fixed objects remained, anything that moved was eliminated entirely.

To call attention to the strangeness, he'd walk through the picture with a hand-mirror, focusing sunlight on the lens from various points, creating fairy-lights that were the only evidence anyone had been in the space.

(Once Seattle starts being sunny, I'll try to drag a camera downtown and give this a shot.)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

ooh, that's a pretty cool way to do it without digital trickery!

I figure doing it digitally could get you some weird night shots: strange low-level lighting from passing cars, but no streaks of light where the cars flowed through...

[wootsauce.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it would be a GREAT pinhole project!

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

When I read shatterstripes's idea, I immediately thought of Boulevard du Temple (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Boulevard_du_Temple.jpg), a very early photograph.

That's a very effective way to remove people from a photograph.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

This wouldn't work in Phoenix, because there is nowhere you can go on a sunny day and see people outside of buildings. Downtown especially. I suppose this could be done at the homeless refugee camp in the park outside the main branch of the Phoenix Library, though they seem to have places to go when it's bright out too.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

oooh, yes. Maybe it's a winter project for Phoenix...

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

If you live in the southeastern US, you can also try this with snow on the ground instead of people. It stays in one place about as long as people do. :)

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

Did you ever see the short film 405? What you describe is similar to how the filmmaker created overhead shots of the empty freeway, from a locked off camera on an overhead crossing.