Naquada

I love the HDR photos I’ve been taking the last few weeks, and in searching through various Flickr groups I found a nice little technique for mixing time lapse and HDR photography.

There are several ways of recording the passage of time in a photograph, an inherently static form. One is to use a long (or bulb) exposure, keeping the shutter open for a few seconds or minutes. These produce those classic ‘car lights at night‘ type photos. The other is to keep the shutter open, but expose the image periodically with a flash, catching moments in time rather than a constant ‘blur’ of time.

An HDTR image is an image in which multiple frames taken over an arbitrary time interval are blended together. The images in the time-lapse set are merged together by progressively sampling time-adjacent images horizontally or vertically. The difference between an HDTR image and a single-frame long exposure is that the contribution to any region of an HDTR image is primarily from a single image from the time-lapse set, rather than an average of all images.

Depending on how the blending is done, the result is an image in which a strip, row or column, is derived from a specific point in time. If a long exposure frame is a stack of acetates of time, an HDTR is a series of strips of time. The strips can be blended in a variety of ways, generally to limit banding artifacts and produce a smoother time gradient.

I hope to get some of these up within the next few weeks..

Well it doesn’t get much cooler than this.. I had a long weekend in Cornwall, the main purpose of which was to see Magic - The Secret Art, the only UK performance by Jeff McBride and Eugene Burger.

Both Jeff and Eugene were kind enough after the show to sign my Mystery School book, get a cosy threesome photo, and a little chat. The fact that Jeff shouted a really warm ‘Hey Andrew, glad to see you!‘ at me as I was wandering over really was just the icing on the cake!! Like I said before I’ve waited a long time to be able to see both my idols live;

It was Jeff McBride performing his Transformation and Masks routines on The Paul Daniels show when I was young that really started me in magic. I thought ‘wow cool.. I want to do that!’ Now funnily I never actually went into stage magic, mainly because stage magic seemed a bit frightening, I only had a small bedroom at home, and also because I quickly found my other hero, Eugene Burger..

Eugene presented magic in such a way that, personally to me, it could almost really be magic.. and everything from that point on was history.. I ate, slept and dreamed magic, and enjoyed every second of it, trying new things that were just so completely unworkable, coming up with weird and wonderful stuff that did work, and finding routines that I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do..

At some point over the last 7 years I lost that feeling, that passion and need.. Sure I still did magic.. but it wasn’t as enjoyable, as passionate, as fun as it first was.. I didn’t crave to know everything about it, I feel the rush from the smile on someone’s face when they just had no idea how I did what just did.. it was just something I did..

Friday evening definitely took me back to when I was younger, I was a kid of eight in a shop full of toys and dreams… I remembered the feeling of oh and ahh.. Grinning like a cheshire cat all the way through as I watched Jeff perform the same routine that got me hooked on magic all those years ago..

Kernow Magic did a great job of getting this all sorted.. and thanks Jeff and Eugene, I hope to see you next year on the master class!!