Journeys are a key part or travelling. They're a necessity, in fact. To get from point A to point B you need to go on a journey. For most people, this is the simple and often only definition for a journey, one point to another. Home to work, home to school and so on. That’s a Journey.
Paths
Something I've realised that I do when I go on a walk or a hike, is take a photo of the path I'll be walking, in a similar fashion each time. It's not normally a conscious choice, just an intuitive theme that I follow, taking a photograph that appeals to me.
I began to think about why photos like this appealed to me. Was it something about the composition of the image, how neatly they fit into a grid with an almost unending view down the middle, or was it something about the anticipation of following a path and not being able to see where it ends? It can represent the start of a journey, standing at the start of something more.
While exploring where I could take these photos and this idea further, I thought about the dolly zoom, a cinematic technique, where the camera zooms out of the subject while being moved towards it at the same time (or vice versa), distorting the background but keeping the subject of the image the same. I decided to try my own attempts at this and see if I could work it into the project
To try and do a dolly zoom I used my zoom lens and a longboard, to get a more fluid backwards and forwards motion.
I made a few attempts at the technique, but found little success. The process was made much harder by not having proper equipment, and having to improvise a rig. I documented my attempts and put some of them in a video. |
I decided to move onto using a Time-lapse or a Hyper-lapse to try and achieve a similar effect to the dolly zoom. A Hyperlapse is similar to a time-lapse, except that it involves moving the camera between shots to achieve a sense of motion.
|
I made a quick experiment from an old photo, zooming in and taking screenshots at certain intervals, then editing the images together into a clip. I thought that this worked relatively well, but lacked the changing depth of field I was aiming for, and the obvious black bars along the side.
|