something in the way

Photography can transform scale, whether in time, space, or a combination of the two. scntfc, the hyper-talented audiovisual artist, sends some eye-explodingly good work our way, prompted by yesterday’s coverage of a two-minute condensation of a trip from San Francisco to Paris.

Before returning to the theme of timelapse time travel and aerospace, let’s look first at what happens when you collapse scale in the spatial dimension via macro photography. Undone is a series of close-up shots, a balletic glimpse of the world viewed closer through a lens. Artist Andy Rohrmann aka scntfc shares it with us.

At top:

An excerpt from the forthcoming film series “Undone”.
Video: scntfc
Music: Burn A Pale Fire (scntfc + Morgan Kuhli) – Pale Fire 5
Canon 5d mkii, 100mm macro, 65mm macro

On the theme of airplane-window timelapse, “Minneapolis to Seattle” from three years ago pieces the airborne-viewed landscape into a patchwork collage. As the creator describes it:

a different take on time lapse photography and photo collage. all photos are taken on a flight from minneapolis to sea-tac, i had completed the basic layout and timelapse a few years ago, and finally polished it up with music, time shifting, and misc effects to give it more character. time shifting is still pretty rough and will be revised, time permitting…maybe in another four years. i have several more in this style, just have to find the time to update those as well.

Here’s another macro video for good measure:

First trailer for the upcoming film series “Undone”.
Music: Burn A Pale Fire (scntfc + Morgan Kuhli)

Canon 5d Mk2, 100mm f/2.8 Macro

Check out more of scntfc’s work – musical and visual – at:
http://strongforthefuture.com/

ImageGlitcher allows you to glitch any image and save the result. Glitched images look like they are being displayed on a broken analog TV. Check it out here.

This demo was built using Peter Nitsch’s BitmapData.js – a very useful JS port of ActionScript’s BitmapData class which makes it easy to manipulate canvas image data. After playing around with it for a while I got some pleasing glitched image results, so I figured it would be useful to wrap it up as a little app. The glitch effect is achieved by:

• Slicing the image horizontally and randomly offsetting the slices
• Randomly selecting a color channel and offsetting again
• Brightening the image
• Adding a ‘scan lines’ overlay.

All the source code is viewable via ‘View Source’. Surprisingly, cross browser development wasn’t too much of a pain once I ignored IE. One of the cool features of HTML5 is native drag and drop support. On Chrome and Firefox you can drag in an image from the desktop.

One issue that came up was that the canvas tag does not allow you to getImageData() on images that are from a different web domain. This is supposedly a security feature to prevent hackers copying images, although I fail to understand why. If a hacker has the URL of an image on your website he already has a local copy of the image – right? Anyway $.getImageData gets around this feature by routing image data through Google App Engine using JSONP.

If I get time there are a few features I want to add in the next version:

• Add ‘Instagram’ style filters
• Add more granular filter options
• Use web workers to avoid hang time

Let me know if you find any issues or if you create any nice images, post a link in the comments.

Already making the rounds on the Web (as well it must, if it is to accomplish its author’s aims), a YouTube video immortalizes roll of film found against all odds in a snow bank. Upright Citizens Brigade video producer Todd Bieber, who found the roll, has turned them into a charming narrative as he looks for the film’s owner.

It’s a reminder of the importance of physical artifact in a digital age. Film by necessity has clear physical form in a single object; digital media has to exist physically somewhere, encoded in storage media, but it hardly has the same sense of definition.

I wish I had something intelligent to say, but I can only smile, especially as lately I’ve been rediscovering film myself. (If only motion/movie film were as easy to work with as still.)

But the question remains compelling: how do you bring physical objects into digital work? Should you? Do you turn to media like film, or do you find a way to make your digital work physical? (Prints, handmade wooden flash drives… even the beam of light that projects your work onto a wall, all can take on new meaning.)

Via NPR: Lost Photos Of NYC Blizzard: Found! [the picture show]

Flickr user garmonique has a gorgeous set of fog photos up. My only regret is that I can't buy prints.

and woman. I love a good flickr photo set. Great!

Is photoshop ruining people's lives by constantly bombarding us with faux-reality. People air-brushed beyond what is ever possible to physically attain? If the models don't live up to their own images, how can anyone else?

Black-and-white photographs of Los Angeles and New York, by Thomas Michael Alleman.

Hendrik Kerstens is a Dutch photographer, his favorite subject is his dauchter Paula. He likes to portray her like seventeenth century Dutch painters did. But with a twist.
You can see more of his work in this gallery.

found at FFFFOUND!

"Tomek Jankowski photography. personal projects + portfolios for models, visage studios and fashion designers.

Polish photographer with a new project called Tkanka - Tissue. The underwater "womb" photos are quite intriguing. Makes me wanna get a water-tank.