Stacking long-exposure photos of stars leads to some pretty neat photos and time-lapse videos, but what happens if you use a similar technique for clouds? That’s what photographer Matt Molloy does. His “photo stack” images of landscapes show clouds that look like smears and brush strokes across the sky.
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We’re shared a couple of “stacked star trail” time-lapse videos over the past few months (see here and here), but those videos comprised nighttime photographs taken from the ground. Photographer Christoph Malin recently decided to try his hand at the technique, but instead of using his own earthbound photographs, he used NASA photographs shot from the International Space Station. The resulting video, shown above, features the stars drawing trails across the “sky” while the Earth creates light streaks down below.
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We’ve shared a number of examples of surreal images created using multiple exposure techniques or by combining images using Photoshop, but did you know that you can also create beautiful images by stacking actual film negatives? Photographer Laina Briedis did some experiments with 35mm film stacking, and achieved some stunning results. She combined photos of stars and sky with pictures of people, creating images that look like they were plucked from someone’s dreams.
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Raleigh, North Carolina-based artist Scott Hazard creates abstract images by tearing shapes into multiple prints of the same photograph, and then stacking the images on top of each other. He uses the technique to create things such as smoke, clouds, and portals in walls. He calls the project “Photo Constructs”.
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Here’s an illuminating (pun intended) video walkthrough by photographer Eric Curry, showing how he went about creating a photo of a B-25 bomber. His technique for lighting the plane is similar to the real estate photography walkthrough that we featured last weekend, and involves lighting the scene a bazillion times from different angles, and then combining the different parts of the photo in Photoshop.

As he says in the video, it’s a useful technique that can be done by “anyone with a digital camera and a tremendous amount of patience.”

(via fotografia)

Chris Kotsiopoulos of GreekSky made this crazy lightning photograph by stacking a large number of separate shots. He tells us,

It was past midnight when I heard from my home at Halandri, Athens an unusual rate of thunders (one every 7-8 seconds!) coming from the Olympic Stadium area 2-3 kilometers away from my home.

Without second thought, I grabbed the camera and the tripod drove quickly to the spot. I set the camera under a tent and I started taking continuous shots. I used an intervalometer so I didn’t have to be behind the camera all the time. I even took a chance by placing my self in the field of view in one of the shots. Fifteen minutes later, it started to rain and the storm was approaching, so I found shelter under the bridge at the right. Finally after 32 minutes, among the hundreds of shots taken, I captured 51 lighting strikes (9 shots where destroyed because of the excess brightness). The photo processing was fairly simple. I stacked the 42 lighting shots with Startrails software, and did some minor improvements with Photoshop.

We’re glad he took the risk of standing in his photo — it’s not often you see one of these shots with people in them. If you want to learn more about how to create this kind of photo yourself, check out this lightning shooting tutorial we posted a while back.

Atmospheric (via Gizmodo)

Image credit: Photograph by Chris Kotsiopoulos and used with permission