Chris Reid's photography blog

Monday, November 9, 2009

Pile Driving

I shot this time-lapse sequence from the same position as several of the images in the Constructions exhibition.

The movie quality is a bit low but the music by John Zorn is great!

Moonrise

Moonrise.

Short time-lapse of Otago Harbour.

Music by Esbjorn Svensson Trio.

Here's an image that I had quite wanted to include in the exhibition. I thought it worked as a fairly random subject that related the stadium construction with Dunedin people. Perhaps it didn't. The show was given a quick curatational eye by Jacque Gilbert before we hung it and this one kept being put to one side. Fair enough, although it used selective blur it had little to do with theme of scale and so out it went. I actually put it up just outside the main exhibition space as an easter egg for the adventurous.

Appropriate use

Tilt shift as an artistic technique has perhaps lost some of the shock of it's originality, except for those who aren't familiar with it. I decided to use it for my Constructions exhibition because I thought that it was now 'mature' and could work within the larger theme of playing with scale.

I had considered using it in combination with the proportional distortion I used for the principal images. The test shot for that is below. While I felt that it was an interesting image and that the techniques worked together rather than against each other I decided that for the exhibition my intentions were better served in other ways.

Stadium construction

In the end I made a secondary set of images using tilt-shift as a sort of complimentary exhibition within the main body of work. I found themes that I had not been fully aware of to do with scale and playfulness. The distorted panoramas gave the viewer an odd shift in perspective (literally and figuratively) and the compositing of sandpit toys into the construction site further meddled with the issue of scale. The tilt-shift images played with scale in a different way inducing a feeling of 'Am I looking at a model?'

I feel that I achieved something with this exhibition other than interesting images from an unusual viewpoint in that there was a sense of fun evident in a subject that has become divisive and turgid.

School of Art

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Tilt shift masters

I first came across the tilt-shift technique in a post on bOING bOING, the culture/technology blog. It was about Olivo Barbieri's waterfall series, an image from that is below. Then I found a tutorial on using photoshop to simulate the effect of tilting the focal plane and I was off in a new creative hobby! I loved the 'Oh no! your messing with my brain!' comments I got from friends. Transforming familiar scenes with a false sense of scale was very interesting and lots of fun.

The images below are from early users of the technique and date from the mid 90's. I'm not sure which are digital blurs and which are optical but I am impressed with the artistry and how my brain gets messed with.