4 Creative Projects that Bend the Reality of Street Scenes
Here is a quick look at some interesting photography projects that present a manipulated view of reality, along with thoughts on how they were done and how you can accomplish the same thing.
#1: empty L.A. by Matt Logue
This project, created over a four year period starting in 2005, gives an interesting glimpse at what Los Angeles would look like if people and their vehicles instantly disappeared off the face of their earth.
There’s are a few ways you could accomplish this.
First, you can stack neutral density filters on your lens to enable extremely long exposure times. The long exposure would cause everything that moves (i.e. people and cars) to disappear from the scene.
However, it doesn’t look like Logue employed this technique, since the clouds in his photographs are clear and well defined. You would also expect trees in long exposure photographs to be soft and blurred, since the leaves are constantly moving.
A second option is to take a very large number of photographs, and then use an image editor to combine only the portions that don’t contain any people or cars. Doing this at a time when the road is least busy would obviously be easiest if editing by hand, though Logue has quite a few shots from busy hours of the day. Photo editors like Photoshop or Enfuse can also help you automatically stack images and filter out non-constants.
Visit the project page to see the rest of the photographs and/or to buy the book.
#2: Tokyo Nobody by Masataka Nakano
Japanese photographer Masataka Nakano spent 11 years shooting photographs of Tokyo devoid of people.
This project is unlike the other three in that no clever image manipulation was done. Nakano visited ordinarily busy locations during times of low activity (i.e. major holidays), and patiently waited for just the right time to make each of his photographs.
Visit the project page here. You can also purchase his paperback book on Amazon.
#3: Babel Tales by Peter Funch
At first, many of Peter Funch’s New York City street scenes seem ordinary. Then, as you look closer, you begin to realize that in each one, there’s something eerily similar with everyone in the scene. Perhaps everyone is holding a manila envelope, or is smoking, or is running, or is looking in the same direction, or is yawning, or is homeless.
You get the idea.
The amazing thing is, these photographs weren’t staged, but rather manipulated.
Funch took each of these photographs two weeks at a time, found people in the frames who had something in common, and stitched the photographs together using an image editor.
While the first two steps (shooting and selecting) are time consuming, the third step (stitching) is what’s difficult. The idea is similar to what we outlined in our “cloning yourself” tutorial, but rather than having a static background that you can easily mask over, stitching this type of photograph might require a pixel by pixel degree of care, since people are constantly walking around in the frame.
You can tell that this stitching is the technique used by Funch by observing that in some of the photographs, the lighting is different for various people in the frame.
It’s somewhat mind-boggling compared to the first two, but still doable.
You can view the official project page here, or check out the rest of the photographs in the series in this gallery.
#4: Orderly Conduct by Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad
Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad shot his orderly conduct series of photographs in three locations: London, Amsterdam, and Toyko. The idea is identical to what Funch did in NYC.
Most of Hashemi-Nezhad’s photographs are easier to accomplish than Funch’s for a couple of reasons.
First, many of them are taken indoors, where the lighting conditions don’t change. This makes it much harder to detect image editing, since there aren’t lighting difference between people in the indoor scenes.
The sparseness of many of the scenes also makes for easier editing. Many of Funch’s photographs were taken up close with people moving around in the frame and overlapping one another. Many of Hashemi-Nezhad’s photographs have minimal overlap between people, and constant backgrounds. This makes it much easier and less time consuming to stitch the photographs together.
For the rest of the Orderly Conduct photographs, you visit his website here.
Hopefully you saw something new in this post that you hadn’t seen before, and that it inspired you to experiment with some new ideas.
If you have any comments on this kind of project, please leave a comment! We’d also love to hear from you if you have links to other similar projects!
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[...] 6, 2009 à 7:47 · Classé sous Liens utiles and taggé: photos, ville Ce lien présente des photos retouchées de nos villes réinventées, sans voiture, piétonne. Et la Suisse dans tout ça [...]
damn, these are great, thanks!
Awsome, great post
also what have us used for the comment forms, it looks nice and would be interested in useing it in one of my projects
Awsome, great post
also what have us used for the comment forms, it looks nice and would be interested in useing it in one of my projects
Great post. Keep it up.
It's called Disqus: http://www.disqus.com
top photo, missed cars in the right corner….very cool regardless
Ah, good catch.
These would have been very difficult to remove using a set of photographs taken in the short period of time needed for similar lighting in the merged photographs. If those cars didn't move at all during the period of time the merged photographs were taken, none of the source photographs would have provided the areas needed to remove the cars.
I think the techniques used in the “empty street” photographs require things to be moving in order to remove them.
these guys really go great lengths to achieve it.
bravo.
I agree, good stuff
[...] post on four creative projects that Bend the Reality of Street [...]
excellent blog! came across or rather i stumbled upon two of the projects before! great stuff… i ♥ the internet!!
[...] http://www.petapixel.com/2009/12/04/4-creative-projects-that-bend-the-reality-of-street-scenes/ [...]
soo cool. Thanks for sharing these images and tips!!
Just came by stumbling…Your stuffs are awesome..Great work
very good piece of work. i would really like to appreciate all the efforts taken ! … beautiful
I am inspired.
pic no.2 got a guy standing to the right.
I also found Babel Tales by Peter Funch very interesting. Did you also see this one? http://www.v1gallery.com/artistimage/image/597/...
Spooky paranoia.
orderly 3 amsterdam redlight! wooooooooooh! radical
Anyone notice the cars are still present in the first photo? Are these the unbeliever cars? Outside of this detail, these pictures are quite spectacular.
Yeah, someone mentioned his a few comments up: http://www.petapixel.com/2009/12/04/4-creative-...
It's because the cars weren't moving, and therefore can't be removed.
What about the 2nd photo if you look to the right of the bridge there is a guy standing there..
wow, this is cool.
Wonderful! Very creative … thanks :)
Fantastic!!!What a magnificient view,creative minds creates better things.
the best set of pictures I have ever seen on the internet or any media!!! amazing and inspiring…
Fantastic!!!What a magnificient view,creative minds creates better things.
the best set of pictures I have ever seen on the internet or any media!!! amazing and inspiring…
most wonderful pics iv'e seen 4 a long time.
most wonderful pics iv'e seen 4 a long time.
realy great
realy great
[...] 4 Creative Projects that Bend the Reality of Street Scenes [...]
These are amazing! Wow.
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[...] 4 Creative Projects that Bend the Reality of Street Scenes. [...]
amazing photos!
amazing photos!
Great post. Must have been a pain in the ass to manipulate these photos together. Amazing nevertheless.
LA – If cars were wiped from the face of the earth, but left in the carparks?
Thank you. very interesting photography. I would like to use this myself one day.
These pictures are great!
Good picture. I've never seen before. Thanks for post.
First 2 sets can be done using the Average tool I do humbly believe. Not particularly difficult.
I wrote a short piece about Peter Funch a year ago; he blew my mind with his savy use of Photoshop in service to the photo, and not the other way around as is most often the case.
http://enticingthelight.com/2009/04/28/when-pho...
I hadn't heard of the other photographers, so I'm glad I ran into this story. I've spent a while going through Matt Logue's Empty L.A. and thoroughly enjoyed it. I've been to L.A. a few times, and it's the opposite of what those photos depict :-)
[...] Art site PetaPixel highlights this fantastic feat of photography (phonetic alliteration much?) along with a few others, seen here. [...]
I think you're missing the point. Taking the cars off the road is to show that the humans have disappeared from LA. Parked cars give no more indication of the presence of people than the buildings around them. A car on the road however would have to be actively manipulated by someone.
[...] Funch is a New York City-based photographer who we featured a while back in a post titled “4 Creative Projects that Bend the Reality of Street Scenes“. Funch photographs scenes for extended periods of time, and then combines people who share [...]
pretty sure that's a car dealership, so they wouldn't have ever moved much.