Silent World is a project by Paris-based artists Lucie & Simon that shows post-apocalyptic views of famous locations around the world. All but one or two of the people in each location are removed from the scene. Rather than use multiple exposures and compositing the images to remove moving objects (e.g. people and cars), they chose to use a neutral density filter — one that’s normally used by NASA for analyzing stars — in order to achieve extremely long exposure times during the day. Read more…
Metropolis is a project by photographer Martin Roemers that consists of long exposure photographs that show the bustle and chaos of large cities.
Specifically, I’m looking at the small stories of the street vendor, the commuter, the passer-by, the market stallholder and other pedestrians, who populate the street or are a part of the traffic. Despite the megacity and its mega-commotion, their environment still maintains a human dimension. I present this by photographing busy locations from above. Moreover, every photo has a long exposure time so that the big city’s vitality is shown through the movement of people and traffic while the image literally focuses on the small story in question. Every megacity is a theatre and every city has a different stage and different actors, but in the end every single one of them is trying to make its way in today’s modern society. [#]
The project was awarded 1st prize in the 2011 World Press Photo competition in the category “Daily Life”. Read more…
For his project Lightscapes by photographer James Reeve photographed cities at night, and then stripped away everything but the lights and windows. The technique turns both buildings and cityscapes into “anonymous patterns of light”. Read more…
Photographer Kien Lam quit his job last year and embarked on a 343 day backpacking journey around the world. He ended up traveling through 17 different countries and capturing 6237 photographs in the process. To share his incredible journey, he created this beautiful time-lapse video with short glimpses into various locations he visited. Each 2 second segment is made up of about 40-60 still photographs.
Between August and October of this year, the crew onboard the International Space Station used a Nikon D3S (at high ISOs) to capture photographs of Earth as they zipped around it at 17,000mph. Michael Konig then took the footage and compiled it into this eye-popping time-lapse video showing what our planet looks like from up there. Read more…
Photographer Anne-Laure House photographs illuminated windows at night in cities around the world, and arranges them into beautiful collages. She writes,
At nightfall, the windows of the flats that are lit up attract more attention than the façade of the buildings that frame them. Lit interiors become real tableaux vivants. The interior takes precedence over the exterior, and we can glimpse moments of people’s intimate lives. I am not actually interested in their intimacy as such, but rather by the space itself – the warmth of a particular light, the twinkling of a Christmas garland or the shimmering glow of a television, the corner of a painting. All these details stir my imagination and inspire my work. When I gaze at these windows, I like to tell myself a story. I capture these intimate moments and build my own structures.”
The collage above shows windows seen in New York City. Read more…
Photographer Samuel Cockedey spent a year photographing the Shinjuku area of Tokyo, Japan using his Canon 5D Mark II, and then created a time-lapse video set to music from the sci-fi film Blade Runner. Titled “Android Dreams”, the time-lapse is both a fitting tribute to Blade Runner and a beautiful portrait of Tokyo at night.
Ask a photographer to shoot a time-lapse portrait of a city, and they might choose a number of famous locations to photograph with a fixed camera. Photographer Jesse Kopp, however, prefers to stay at the ground level and photograph what it feels like to actually be roaming around the streets. He visits famous cities around the world and creates time-lapse videos out of photos taken while walking from landmark to landmark. It’s an awesome way to get a feel of what each city is like (the video above shows Paris). Read more…
For his project “Day Into Night”, photographer Stephen Wilkes set up a 4×5 camera with a 39-megapixel digital back 40-50 feet off the ground in a cherry picker, and photographed the scene throughout the course of one day. Keeping a constant aperture, he adjusted his shutter speed to compensate for the position of the sun. Afterward, the hundreds of images captured were edited to roughly 30-50 photos, and then seamlessly Photoshopped together to show a gradual transition from day to night. Read more…
