Photographer Salman Ashrafi notes that in today's world, depending on what we do, we rarely find the time to just sit and observe everything that goes on around us. His movies, known as 'Fotografic Memories' represent Salmans' work to make up for this loss of time and we really like his technique of combining frames with timelapse and music as the first example below of Toronto demonstrates:
Countless fragments of existing architectural photography are merged into multi-layered shapes. The resulting collages introduce a third abstract point of view next to the original ones of architect and photographer - this is the concept behind Extracts of Local Distance.
Digital scans of analogue architectural photography form tiny pieces of a large resulting puzzle. The original pictures are being analysed and categorised according to their vanishing-points and shapes. Based on this analysis, slices are being extracted from the source image. These slices retain the information of their position corresponding to their original vanishing-point and thus form a large pool of pieces, ready to be applied to new perspectives and shapes.
Using the extracted image segments, it is now possible to form collages of originally different pictures with a new common perspective. In order to compose a collage, a perspective-grid is defined and a lining of matching image segments is being applied. The segments are not altered to match the frame but fitting ones are chosen from the sheer mass of possible pieces. By defining additional keywords which describe the content of the original photographs, the selection of segments used for the final composition can be influenced. Thus a contextual layer is added through the semantic linking with the source material.
The recompositions mix and match the views and perspectives of both the architect and the photographer with a third, newly chosen frame. The resulting fine-art prints are entirely unique, and represent a new take on architectural imagery.
The image above grabbed our attention while searching for HDR City Images. Taken using 3 exposures which are then subsequently merged using Photomatix the photo by Paulo Barcello's is one of the best we have seen.
HDR is an interesting technique and one that we have been promising to do a tutorial on for a while. The weather in London is improving and with the booklet complete (more on that and availability/pricing next week after the new print run) we are ready to go and capture some shots for a 'how to'...
Our plans to capture High Dynamic Range (HDR) images in Hong Kong were put to rest due to mist and London seems to of been lost in drizzle for months. As soon as we get the right conditions a full tutorial will appear on the blog as its part of the forthcoming book.
In the meantime Stuck in Customs - unique photography for unique people have some stunning HDR images of New York.
It is well worth taking a look at the full set of photographs via the main Stuck in Customs page.
