NYC Photo Walk Impressions

From November 10-13, 2012, I was in New York for the NYC Photo Walk, filming some behind the scenes impressions. This is a short video I edited together from that material.

During those 4 days, a lot of us were doing long exposure photography, a genre that not only captures a much longer time span than regular photography, smoothing out any fast motion into something more ethereal, but also forces the photographer to work more slowly and mindfully, given the amount of time each shot takes. Even though NYC can be very hectic, I wanted this video to reflect this slowing down of time. In a few shots I also experimented with a new technique which I call "long exposure slow motion".

I decided not to take a tripod along on this trip, which at first may seem somewhat limiting, given that it's quite hard to get steady footage when filming hand held with a DSLR. In retrospect however, I think many of the shots I got are way more dynamic than if I had used a tripod. With a little bit of practice and, where necessary, a bit of stabilization on post, it's surprising what kind of hand-held camera moves you can get away with.

Architecture in Motion workshop

It's been in the making for a while but finally it's time to announce the Architecture in Motion workshop that I'm organizing together with Joel Tjintjelaar in November. This workshop is a bit different from the usual photography workshops, in that it explores the edge between long exposure photography and time lapse cinematography. Both techniques can be used to capture time in different ways, and and in this workshop we'll make the boundary between stills and moving images almost disappear. See the below post for more details, and follow the Architecture in Motion Workshop page on Google+ to stay up to date. Don't wait too long to sign up though, as the number of participants is very limited.

You can find more information on the Architecture in Motion workshop and sign up here >

Lost in the Woods - Again

A re-processed version of a shot that I took over a year ago with Brit, as part of the "Lost in the Woods" series. Originally I picked this one because I liked the composition, but then opted to go with a different one. It was taken somewhere deep in the woods (er... our local park), where a tree had fallen over. It's roots were now completely exposed and formed a wall of awesome texture against which I positioned Brit. Used a bit of fill flash from the on-camera flash plus an external Nikon SB900.

I had to push the camera to ISO1000, which on the Nikon D200 means noise-central. That's where the skin-smoothing tool can come in handy. It's not just for making skin look better. In fact, you can use it very often to strategically clean up noise in parts of your image. The processing was entirely done in Aperture.

A long shot

On July 7 and 8 I had the pleasure of attending the Fine Art Long Exposure Photography workshop organized by Marc Koegel and Joel Tjintjelaar in Domburg, The Netherlands. I was shooting some behind-the-scenes footage, and the (very) short film above was created from some of those shots.

My goal was to give the various shots a look that you would normally only get from a long exposure photograph, but in motion. If you have been following this blog, you know that I’ve been experimenting with this technique for a while. If you’re interested, read on for a little explanation of how these shots were created.

Click to read more ...

Pre-announcement: New York City Architectural Photography Walk / Course

Image: Forever in my Heart by Daniel Portal

November 10-13, 2012, I will be in New York City with International Award Winning Photographers, Joel Tjintjelaar and Sharon Tenenbaum. Come join us for four days of shooting architecture in one of the most exciting cities in the world. From skyscrapers to city views and everything in between. This four day photo course will be primarily hands on experience, we will be walking throughout the city and visiting a few locations per day with review sessions.

Learn from Joel and Sharon how to transform your photography to Fine Art by developing a vision. I myself will be there to record the whole experience in fine art documentary style. I will also help get you started with DSLR cinematography, so you won't have to limit yourself to still images.

Click to read more ...

Getting into the flow with 500px

A while ago, photo sharing site 500px.com launched their new interface. Where Flickr hasn’t updated their interface for years (that’s decades in internet time), it’s nice to see 500px set an example of where things might be going in the future of online photo sharing. The new interface looks decidedly fresh and has a couple of things I really like:

Flow

500px took a good look at what makes for a compelling presentation for images and came up with “flow”. Just like Facebook’s timeline, it’s based on the idea that a stream of information doesn’t necessarily look very compelling when presented in a straightforward grid or list. Instead, they use a dynamic layout that shows images in different sizes and aspect ratios. In this format, you get a nice presentation of your own images mixed with the ones you liked. But it doens’t stop there, which brings us to the next topic...

Curation

Online photo sharing is great, but there’s always the question of how to find photographers and images you really like among the millions of mediocre uploads. There has to be some mechanism to filter the good stuff from the rest. And not just the good stuff in general, but the stuff that’s good according to your personal taste.

Click to read more ...

Behind the scenes with Joel Tjintjelaar

A few blog posts ago I wrote about the work of photographer Joel Tjintjelaar. This is a short impression that I shot of Joel at work, creating some long exposure images in Rotterdam. Since he is mostly known for his long exposure black & white photography, I wanted to create that same look & feel and capture some more long exposure video shots, similar to what I did in my previous video.

Unlike those previous shots however, I didn't shoot a RAW timelapse, but simply recorded some long video shots to make the process quicker. That, in combination with the fact that there wasn't too much contrast in the clouds, made the effect less dramatic in most of the shots, but a couple turned out somewhat usable.

You can find out more about Joel Tjintjelaar and his work on bwvision.com

Taking motion design to the next level

The opening titles of David Fincher's film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are one of the most impressive pieces of CGI/motion design I've seen in a while. Onur Senturk created these amazing visuals in cooperation with Blur Studio. They took vignettes from different parts of the film and transformed them into a mesmerizing, dark, oozing piece of visual art. If you're curious about the ideas and process behind it, you can read more here, or - if you're more technically inclined - here.

Vision + Action = Awesomeness

The Shape of Light IV by Joel Tjintjelaar (used with permission)

What makes a great image? Composition, lighting, timing, post-processing? All of those are important, but they won’t get you very far without vision. Vision sounds like a very vague concept, but I like to describe it as the ability to see what a shot or a scene could become when approached in a certain way. However, you can have lots of vision and still not produce any great images if you don’t take action and actually create the shot you envisioned.

A good example is the above image by Joel Tjintjelaar. It shows a building in the center of Rotterdam. I have walked past this building many times, and so have probably millions of other people. But they didn’t take the time to look at it, didn’t have a vision or didn’t take action. That’s one of the interesting things about photography: it’s always possible to find new and interesting shots in places that you would think have been photographed to death.

But where does inspiration come in? To me personally, inspiration isn’t something that just happens. Often I set out with a certain goal or rough idea, and along the way some other subject or angle catches my eye. Inspiration is something that fuels your imagination and gives you the drive to keep going. But you have to get going in the first place. The more you explore, the more inspiration.

By the way, also make sure to check out Joel’s website bwvision.com for more amazing long exposure photography (and some interesting tutorials), and his Google+ profile.

The long now

Recently I created this short experimental piece based on the idea of a long exposure timelapse. I was trying to come up with a way to create the effects and style often seen in long exposure photography, but in motion. A lot of timelapse videos seem to have something rushed about them, and I wanted to create a more Zen-like feel, as it were.

My first thought was to take a number of long exposure photos, and create a time lapse out of those in the usual manner. The problem with that is that, because of the long exposure, you can only create one or two frames per minute. If you were to create a timelapse sequence out of those images, any motion would seem incredibly fast, quite the opposite of what we set out to achieve.

Then I came across a Final Cut Pro plugin named Long Exposure, created by CHV Plugins, that blends together a number of frames before and after the current frame, thus creating a long exposure effect out of regular, short exposure frames.

An added benefit is that this helps a lot to reduce any flicker because of differences in exposure of individual frames in the original footage. This usually results from the lens not opening up to the exact same aperture for every shot, even though it’s set to manual. There are workarounds to avoid this, but we won’t go into too much technical detail here.

One drawback of this way of working is that you can’t do any slider moves or any other forms of camera motion during the shoot, since that will blur everything in the shot. Only the parts of the image that don’t move will end up not being blurred. Of course you could apply some zooming or panning in post, or do some compositing to simulate camera motion. In this case I decided to keep it very simple though. I’m planning to experiment some more with this techique in the future. Stay tuned...

Edited in Final Cut Pro X, graded with Magic Bullet Looks.

Soundtrack: Bane (Architect Remix) by Hecq. Get it on iTunes (and make sure to check out his other stuff)