Venetian cinematics and time-lapse

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I’ve been making cinematic stills for a while now, and have had this niggling feeling that they felt too static – after all, cinema implies motion. Sure, it’s possible to capture a pose of dynamic imbalance in a subject where they’re clearly caught mid-step or similar, but that doesn’t always work if the subject isn’t moving much (but obviously isn’t completely still, because humans normally never are). This series is an experiment to do blend motion, mood, and above all, the idea of intransigence and just passing through – which most of the people in Venice are doing.

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The light of Venice is fantastic around twilight and early night: you’ve got these little pools from the street lights, which are cast onto old, textured walls and in puddles on the flagstones; shop windows are recessed into thick stone mullions, which means that you also get nice soft spill from the sides – much like large softboxes. Finally, when there’s a little rain, everything becomes a little shiny and starts to reflect its ambient environment – the quality of light just becomes atmospherically magical. I suppose an alternate title for this photoessay could be ‘The umbrellas of Venice’; there’s something evocative and ethereal about the floating, colourful shapes, which are simply at odds with both the atmosphere and the sombre people. Unlike in other parts of the world, it seems that colourful umbrellas are de rigeur. Together with the ambiguous shadows, anything darker simply feels sinister.

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Besides integrating motion, I’ve also been experimenting with using a wider 2.4:1 aspect ratio, more closely matching mainstream cinema and a very interesting challenge to compose with – it’s much harder to find appropriate foreground than you might think; lenses ‘draw wider’ because of this, and if there are human elements, they’ve got to either be truncated or small. It’s great for adding context in a constructed set, or emphasising horizontal distance, but is really challenging to work with when trying to include vertical detail – your camera has to be at precisely the right height for all of the elements to align, and usually lower than you might think. It also doesn’t help that none of the stills cameras have cinematic crop guide lines either in finder or LCD.

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For almost all of these images, I didn’t do any in-camera curation – partially because the environmental conditions weren’t pleasant, partially because I was trying to make the most of the short windows in which the umbrellas were out. The scenes may look staged, but the reality is you may be waiting quite a long time for the ‘right-looking’ person or combination of people to come past. All you can do is set up and wait with anticipation. Whilst thumbing through the images on the back of the camera to find a particular one, a little one of those serendipitous discoveries happened: the playback speed of single frames was fast enough to make it appear like a stop-motion video. I of course then had to keep all and grade* all of the outtakes and unused frames into a time-lapse…

*Batch processed through ACR for each scene; adjustments made to one frame, synchronised to all – doable because almost all of the time the camera was on a tripod – and saved direct. Photoshop CC has video editing capabilities; you can import single still frames directly to a video layer or stack and it will automatically sequence.

This is probably one of the few times you’ll see my outtakes! Note that for the vertical frames, I’ve done a crop to fit to the horizontal 16:9 aspect ratio, so you aren’t seeing the whole image. I leave you now with the final individual frames – there’s a little more processing here than in the video simply because it’s impractical to dodge and burn 300+ images consistently from frame to frame…enjoy! MT

This series was shot with a tripod at shutter speeds ranging from 2s to 1/8s (depending on the speed of the people) with a Pentax 645Z and 55/2.8 SDM. Postprocessing was done using the cinematic workflow in Making Outstanding Images Ep. 4 Exploring Style and Ep.5 Processing for Style.

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