Tricks and technicks: the ‘-dividual’ city
I just returned from Bombay a month back where I was doing a photo shoot (or should we call this pixelography nowadays?) of the city. The aim here was to create a portrait of global cities in terms of what I call ‘-dividualism’ — that which precedes the individual. We have seen too many picture of smiling faces, or more specifically, too much photography of teeth. Of individuals and teeth; of the National Geography imaginary of smiley faces of the exotic world that we grew up on. But for anybody who stays in a giant city such as Bombay for more than a few days will know that in such an enormous metropolis, most of the people we never can or will experience as individuals. Rather, it is the non-linear mass of collective movement, flows, moorings, accelerations, trans- and interactions that we experience. This is what I call the “-dividual city.” (See a wider theoretical history of the dividual at the P2P Foundation.) (FLICKR has the full series if you click on the image):
So instead of looking at the the individual as the primary means of representing the urban experience — as has been again and again — I was more interested in seeing the city as a wider assemblage of different spaces and speeds through which people have to navigate in their daily existence. Therefore, instead of taking pictures of people, I was more interested in seeing a kind of an a-anthropocentric vision of the world: not seeing frozen moments, but seeing fluctuating frame-rates, seeing different timescales of existence from cars to people to buildings to nature bubbling in-between.
What was interesting as I was showing the first “sketches” of this series around friends and other professional photographers, the most common question was: how did I do this? How was I able to achieve such a frame-rate/time-based effect? Did I use a special camera? How did I achieve the multiple-exposure and ghosting effect? So while this technique is still in development, I decided to start off here with a brief tutorial of how to do such time- and/or framerate-based photography and the possible techniques that can be used for further projects.
Here are the steps explained below for the first time:
1) MULTIPLE EXPOSURES / AUTO-BRACKETING: First of all, I developed here a customized technique of photography that combines multiple exposure-photography with high-dynamic-range-imaging (HDRI) and digital painting to give the pictures a time-based feeling and movement to them. So to understand how this works, you have to understand some of the principles of HDRI photography. When you HDRI photography, you basically take multiple shots and exposures of the same scene instead of one that you do in normal photography. So when you take a picture of a scene, instead of doing one picture, you take, for instance, the following five exposures: -4/ -2/ 0 /+2 /+4. What we therefore get is a full dynamic range of the dark areas and highlights of the picture which is not possible through normal photograpghy. HDRI photographic techniques are explained more carefully HERE.
2) HDR MERGE: Once you have done the different different exposure of the scene, you need to somehow combine the images. To do this, I then used a HDR software called Photomatix. Photomatix allows you to take multiples pictures and it automatically merges and created a composite of the 5 different pictures with the maximum dynamic range between lights and shadows.
3) RANDOM MOVEMENT / COMPOSITE: The thing about HDRI photography is that it does not work really well with movement — at least that is what we are supposed to believe. The software cannot calculate the dynamic range for moving objects as they come in 5 different places. Normally you need to use a tripod to get as static images as possible. There are certain ways to avoid this problem such as auto-aligning images but they seldom work and people and crowds are notoriously difficult to capture because of this problem of time. However, here is also the trick! If we do not even try to get rid of the multiple exposures when you create a HDR composite, the software calculates a value for all these different exposures. Specifically this happens when you get rid of the software’s own “auto-alignment functions” and “reduce ghosting options”. So when there is movement, this creates a ghosting effect that we see above. This process, as far as I have experimented so far, is quite random. You get some degree of control to the exposures of these images but the different shapes and forms that emerge are quite unpredictable. You can see some of some of the effects below from close-ups of the pictures where figures and forms break into each other and into occasional noise.
4) DUOTONE: The rest is pretty simple. I wanted this series to be in duotone so the next thing I did was move the image to Photoshop and used a set of filters to achieve the effect I wanted. Specifically, I did the following pretty standard Photoshop CS3 adjustments across the different images to get the desired effect:
–> duplicate layer
–> soft light, opacity 20-30%)
–> gaussian blur 20px
–> adjustments – black and white – with green filter
–> greyscale to duotone (light brown tone) to rgb color
–> adjust master saturation -30%
5) DODGING AND BURNING: Finally, I used a Wacom graphics pad to paint over the original images to exaggerate some of the ghosting effects of the images and overall give it the surreal slightly dark atmosphere. Specifically, what I did here was to us “Dodge – Highlights” and “Burn – Shadows” to get the specific effects that I wanted. No major strategy here: this is building on a technique I have been developing for years of painting with light on images which can give rather interesting effects such as in this in one of my earlier series below.
Anyway, much more I could and will write here. Things such as time of day, light conditions etc affect how this effect works. Also we could use neutral density filters that also would allow you to further control light and exposure times with more precision. There are multiple variables here that can still be experimented with and I am probably going to do the part II of this experiment in London when the weather gets dreary and colors grey. Meanwhile, hoping to get this series exhibited soon — either solo or together with my crazy photographer friend from Northeast India in a joint exhibition about people caught up in spaces not of their own making. He works with tribal borderlands and fragile border spaces; this series is about urban spatiality — somehow the contrast and the overlaps, we feel, would be a great mix.
This, I believe, is a good example of how classical photography, creatiuve use of software and a little bit of randomness can create effects that were perhaps not possible before through classical methods and can be rather effective to achive the artistic effect you are after.
[Tools used: Pentax k20d, Photomatix, Photoshop CS3 and a fair amount of Old Monk]
For a while, I have been pondering on this: can I create a bunch of extremely stupid automatons (actually, a tweak on Finite State Machines), that co-exist independently and making self-contained selfish decisions, and yet create an ecosystem that seems to be making smart decisions?
Soum is a new media technology architect, ex-mixercast founding member, filmmaker, photographer, and a general wanderer who lives partly in London and rest of the time in Mumbai. He builds scalable web sites, dabbles in emerging technologies, and spends rest of his time in various film and photography projects.
Matti is a researcher, designer and visual artist working with emerging digital technologies globally. He is currently dayjobbing as a Teaching Fellow in Digital Culture at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and spends time shuttling between London, Helsinki and the rest of the world.
Supreet Sethi is a technology dabbler and an artist with diverse experience from enterprise computing to installation art. He has keen interest in software architecture and in-depth knowledge of mobile computing.