For week of Oct. 25- Awesome Time and Motion

 This post is to celebrate some rather brilliant time and motion photos. I spent a lot of time trying to come up with creative ways to capture and abstract things using time and motion for our project, and now, I constantly notice the use of time and motion in photography. The above photo is of moths flying around an outside light. You don't notice their flight patterns or their wing shape very much until being able to track their motion with a slow shutter speed. 

 This is a famous landmark road in Angola. The fog and near-60-second-exposure help capture what looks like fairy flights or snakes of light or fire. It makes this photo look like a movie still or fantasy landscape.

A woman in Bangladesh rides in between train cars to keep from having to pay for a ticket. With the sun and time of day, it would have been easy for the photographer to stop the train tracks underneath. However, I like the sense of motion and danger one gets from a moving ground underneath the photo's subject. It gives the viewer a sense of riding with the woman.

For week of Oct. 18- Beautiful storms

One of my favorite things to do to give myself the heeby jeebies is to look at pictures and watch videos of storm cells and tornadoes. I love storm photos. I think it is the comfort of knowing I will not be swept away but being allowed to watch nature's awesome, awful, destructive show in the sky. This photo above was entered into the National Geographic photo contest, in Montana. It looks unreal. I didn't know the sky could form itself into something this twisted and beautiful.

 

  I like the vertical motion of this photo. Often, skies look horizontal in pictures, with viewers forgetting that the sky continues above and behind and all around us. I like that we see so much of the sky, and that the clouds seem in motion, perfectly and abstractly sculpted.

I do not understand this photo, and there is little info in its caption: "Cosmic. Mother nature doing what she does best," by Patrick John O'Doherty. I have no idea what element or force of nature is going on, but it looks like heaven and is still quite clearly earth. Glorious. I love to be absorbed into it.

For week of Oct. 11- An Edwardian Family Album

I was searching for artistic renditions of family albums on Google and home upon these examples from an amateur photographer named Jack Urton, an amateur but skilled photographer during the turn of the 19th century. 480 negatives were discovered in a cupboard in an old house in Liverpool, England a few years ago, and these photos have been shown in museums as documentation of an average middle class family's life during the late 1800s.

They are not anything groundbreaking, but they are incredible in portraying aspects of life rarely documented during that era--most photographs we see from the time are formal portraits. They almost seem to sweet, too perfect to be true. Like Mary Poppins come to life. They are intimate, yet educational.

I find this one to be especially beautiful, with sky and land both dramatically captured by film in a way that digital isn't able to do without combining multiple exposures.