Augmented Reality – HyperZooming

What can augmented reality, hyperZooming and time-lapse all have in common and who cares?

Growing up in the world of wet film based photography and motion pictures, creating FX was a tedious process where the mistakes outweighed the successes. When I began experimenting with digital photography in the 80’s, I thought that eliminating the darkroom would make things easier.  This turned out to be true until the late 90’s when I began to look at experimental FX which turned out to be even more complex than film.  Now computers replace the darkroom, algorithms replace processing chemicals and multiple exposures.

Recently, I attended a NHRA race in Las Vegas to resurrect a ghost car shot that used to be done in camera using double exposures.  I also attempted a blur-lapse time-lapse of the crew of the Patron Funny Car rebuilding between runs.  Talking to team members, I tried to explain another concept called hyper-lapse where the camera moves during exposures creating a sequence of frames that are turned into a video showing augmented reality movements.  Words never tell the story the same as images and that is why the adage, “a picture is worth 1000 words” applies.

When I became an official Getty image photographer, it was in three areas.  Still HDR photography, Video and Time-lapse. These are my listed areas of expertise.  I roll this up into a term that I call augmented reality. Or simply taking real-world images and altering them to bend the viewers mind.  My gallery is almost exclusively augmented reality.  Perhaps my most challenging area of work is time-lapse with HDR applied to each frame.

The world of time-lapse is always enthralling to me and the fact that I can see real life in time-lapse makes it easier for me to create new ideas and pull them off.  One area I am experimenting with is called Hyperzooming  It requires not only moving the camera, but zooming the lens at the same time as a frame by frame exposure is done.  At 1 frame per second, it takes 900 frames to create a 30 frame per second 30 second time-lapse video.  Okay, hard to imagine, below is perhaps the finest example of what can be done applying augmented reality to the world of time-lapse.

Enjoy!

Bob

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