Yeah. I was actually thinking along similar lines today.
I started out by asking myself how I might capture in a photograph the richness of the things that don’t move, without it just appearing flat and static.
As I was walking along, staring at a tree, a van zipped past, and I was struck not so much by the depth of the everlasting trees, but how briefly the van was there. Taken from a tree’s perspective, the van’s presence is but a fraction of a moment, which kind of puts our preoccupation with what moves in perspective. Why do we grant so much importance and attention to something that is only present for ten seconds before it’s gone, whereas the tree will stand there and be part of our sense of place for sixty years or more?
So my thoughts went from trying to somehow capture the solidity of the eternal to depicting how briefly moving things matter. Visually, the obvious technical answer is stop-action or time-lapse or long-exposure photography, something where the element of time is built into the very form. By showing the van as a temporary blip or a whooshing thing so blurred as to be almost invisible, that provides a great contrast to the solidity and visual detail you’d get with a long exposure of something that isn’t moving.
It’s something of a clichéd photographic technique, contrasting a moving object with an unmoving one, but I think it’s something I’d like to do more of. The results are difficult to predict and somewhat serendipitous, but I think I would enjoy working with it.
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Date: 2006-08-25 08:39 pm (UTC)Yeah. I was actually thinking along similar lines today.
I started out by asking myself how I might capture in a photograph the richness of the things that don’t move, without it just appearing flat and static.
As I was walking along, staring at a tree, a van zipped past, and I was struck not so much by the depth of the everlasting trees, but how briefly the van was there. Taken from a tree’s perspective, the van’s presence is but a fraction of a moment, which kind of puts our preoccupation with what moves in perspective. Why do we grant so much importance and attention to something that is only present for ten seconds before it’s gone, whereas the tree will stand there and be part of our sense of place for sixty years or more?
So my thoughts went from trying to somehow capture the solidity of the eternal to depicting how briefly moving things matter. Visually, the obvious technical answer is stop-action or time-lapse or long-exposure photography, something where the element of time is built into the very form. By showing the van as a temporary blip or a whooshing thing so blurred as to be almost invisible, that provides a great contrast to the solidity and visual detail you’d get with a long exposure of something that isn’t moving.
It’s something of a clichéd photographic technique, contrasting a moving object with an unmoving one, but I think it’s something I’d like to do more of. The results are difficult to predict and somewhat serendipitous, but I think I would enjoy working with it.