Time-lapse images of West Peak that show the contrasts between the beauty of the natural setting and the detritus of the old Air Force Station are just one aspect of the film I’m making. As I wrote in my first blog post, the overall point of this piece is to spearhead a fundraising campaign to restore the peak to its natural state. That means there will be historical material, interviews, reconstructions, and all of the things you’d expect from a storyteller such as Ken Burns.
One of the most important things I need to do is establish the location of the site so that everyone can clearly see where it is. The time-lapse material doesn’t do that very well, so I need to augment it with aerial images. I’m doing this with two kinds of aerial footage: images from a helicopter starting at the Golden Gate Bridge and working up to an orbit of the Peak, and images from a drone shot low and in the ruins themselves. I’ll be combining these with additional footage to establish the setting and emotional pace very early on in the film.
Art Reactor is a digital art school for middle and high school students, created by Jennifer Fry and Josh Cardenas. They teach students how to be artists, not just computer users. By learning the basic principles of art and how to create with digital tools, students can produce amazing, original work! Incredible things like virtual 3D sculpture, vector art, interactive virtual worlds, projection mapping, VJing, and more. Jennifer and Josh strive to have their students become independent artists, developing the technical skill they need to express their creative vision.
I’ve been to a banquet—Hendrik Paul’s new show at The Image Flow, Light From Within. It’s a show with crescendos of excitement and photographs that grant the viewer entry into the personal vision of an emerging voice. There are some many faceted gems here. As with any emerging photographer, about one third of the show consists of classic image making. Though masterful, as classic uses of composition, light, tonal value, subject matter, etc., they are images that don’t add anything new to the vocabulary of photography and don’t clear his unique voice. However, these are silenced by the majority of the show, which consists of images that not only add words and phrases to photography’s vocabulary, but also employ these additions to convey stories of genuine seeing.
Barbara Hazen is a passionate photographer who recently turned her hobby into a career. She has been working with Stuart one-on-one for the past few years, and had a solo exhibit at The Image Flow in 2012. As part of an ongoing goal to challenge herself photographically, she entered her work into a highly competitive, national juried portfolio review… and was accepted! Read her story of the review experience.
Born in Canada, Margot Hartford’s love of photography was encouraged while attended a photography poly-technical university in Toronto. After school, she worked as a full-time assistant for an advertising photographer learning more about the practicalities and business of being a commercial shooter.
Landscape time-lapse video requires movement to be interesting. That’s usually accomplished by motion control and (more importantly) dramatic moving light in the form of clouds and shadows. In the Bay Area that means winter is our window to shoot time-lapse of any weather besides fog. (As I demonstrated in my Day in the Life of a Fire Lookout video<, fog can be a great subject but when you’re on top of a mountain and pointing the camera upwards it doesn’t help much.)
I began shooting for the West Peak project in late December and by early January I had learned a lot about what I need to do to get the shots I want. The West Peak area I’m working in is between 2450 and 2530 feet in elevation and when the cloud ceiling is just around that height the scene becomes very dramatic. The sight of the clouds rolling across the landscape and breaking to reveal the Marin headlands provides strong visual cues that we are on the top of a mountain.
Henrik Kam has been documenting the creation of the stunning new SF landmark, the SF Jazz Center!
SF Jazz hired him to document the construction and progress of the SF Jazz Center over a period of 18 months. Among other things, Henrik mounted a web-cam to create time lapse sequences. Currently, he is in the process of making the final photos of the project. You can see his work HERE.
Henrik will be working with another impressive SF landmark, the new SFMOMA addition, later this year.
We are happy to have Henrik teaching The Flow’s Architectural Photography and Urban Landscape class again this year. His knowledge of the San Francisco landscape, on the ground technical and artistic experience and thorough understanding of architectural photography will make for an amazing class!
Photographer and filmmaker Gary Yost writes about his project to document the history of the lost West Peak of Mt. Tamalpais.
Over the past two months I’ve been busy conducting initial tests of new motion-control equipment I’ve acquired for creating the time-lapse portion of the project. One of my frustrations with the two-foot slider I used in the Fire Lookout piece is that it wasn’t long enough to provide enough visual parallax cues to make larger scenes look three-dimensional. These parallax cues are essential to providing an immersive sense of the scene because when the camera is moving, closer objects will move across your visual field much more quickly than objects farther away. When shooting basic time-lapse sequences you can easily lock the camera down on a tripod and shoot a frame every few seconds. That’s easy to do, but to get parallax effects you need to mount the camera on a motorized slider that will move it a fraction of an inch after every shot. This technique was invented by Ron Fricke in the late 1970s for the groundbreaking film Koyannisqatsi, and then refined for his later masterpieces, Chronos, Baraka, and 2012’s Samsara.
Alexa Dilworth, Publishing Director and Senior Editor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (CDS), was one of the judges at PhotoPhilanthrophy’s Activist’s Awards live judging here at The Image Flow in January.
She has written an honest and thought provoking blog for PhotoPhilanthropy about her experience as a judge and some of the challenges she encountered.
How does a photographer create a body of work that viewers can really see, take in with an awakened sensibility, and be engaged enough with to act, to answer a call to action?
This will be Jeff Zaruba’s second year teaching a class at The Flow. He likes to get into the “why” behind his students interest in photography, and help them understand their vision and curiosity. He finds working with the students incredibly rewarding as he helps them gain confidence and reach the next level of their artistic potential.
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