11 photos that only make one

[smee]

ajgaragebw by ah_mr_smee, on Flickr
ajgarage by ah_mr_smee, on Flickr

Arne Jacobsen's Skovshoved garage. Built in 1936 and still a working petrol station although the garage part is now an ice cream parlour!
One of the (many) reasons we wanted to get the Elise to Denmark.
Being a working petrol station meant this composite image was pretty difficult as we often had to stop to let people fuel up, including some dosser in a 911 that faffed about for 15 minutes getting tennis rackets out of his bloody boot.
11 light painted frames merged together. I used a flash on a remote, a torch and an iphone to light parts of the car and merged the frames using the lighten layer function.
I prefer the black and white but have included the colour picture for your comments.

[campbell]

I like both. You have too much time on your hands. And talent.

[j2 lot]

[robin]

Perhaps a stupid question, but why didn't you just take a photograph of it? i.e. why does that need to be a composite (honest question - it's not obvious to me!).

[smee]

Not a stupid question. Main reason is to control light, it takes time to paint the panels and so a much longer exposure time would be required which would result in the image being over exposed. In some of the shots used for the car the exposure time was 30 seconds which resulted in complete loss of detail on the garage. The background shot was less than a second.

[graeme]

Love it!

[Dominic]

Great shot. (or shots)

Not sure if intentional, but from an artistic point of view, the pool of light from the headlights nicely echoes the forecourt canopy.

[BigD]

Yeh great pictures and I prefer the colour one.

[smee]

Dom, that was just luck!

[robin]

You need a higher dynamic range image sensor ... then you could take the whole picture on a single exposure 30s exposure sounds like taking a picture in star light?

[graeme]

Even with that magical fantastical infinite dynamic range sensor (which one day will cost 10p per dozen), there's still a ton of artistic input to balance ratios in different areas of the scene. Yes, you could theoretically capture all the sensor data you needed with a single exposure, but when you got home you'd still have to save 11 manually-adjusted copies of it, then mask parts of them back together artistically, and in such a way that it doesn't offend the eye and look like an HDR image.

Simply, you couldn't recreate that image from one layer, even if you gathered all the pixel data with one magic shot.

Good skillz!

[H8OAG]

Electrical arithmetic for beginners

(headlight main beam coupled with heater on etc) x ( the amount of time you were fannying about with your box brownie) = imminently fooked alternator

[smee]

Even with that magical fantastical infinite dynamic range sensor (which one day will cost 10p per dozen), there's still a ton of artistic input to balance ratios in different areas of the scene. Yes, you could theoretically capture all the sensor data you needed with a single exposure, but when you got home you'd still have to save 11 manually-adjusted copies of it, then mask parts of them back together artistically, and in such a way that it doesn't offend the eye and look like an HDR image.

Simply, you couldn't recreate that image from one layer, even if you gathered all the pixel data with one magic shot.

Good skillz!

Eh, what Graeme said cheers

[smee]

Electrical arithmetic for beginners

(headlight main beam coupled with heater on etc) x ( the amount of time you were fannying about with your box brownie) = imminently fooked alternator

Ha, well this was post alternatorgate...

Headlights only on in one of the 11 shots as well

[graeme]

Is your front nearside indicator damaged in that shot? Also, the badge on the bonnet looks like a cheap ebay one, not a proper Lotus one. Damn, that would really annoy me. Totally ruins the shot for me.