I asked myself, would the same images, if rendered in CG or photoshopped, lose their charm/appeal? My conscience responds with a resounding "Yes". So, then the process itself must be the art and not the end result. The process being actually flying the drone, taking long exposures instead of pressing buttons on a keyboard and moving the mouse to generate or modify an image. Why is the former process more appealing than the latter? Both are intellectually challenging processes. I always struggle with this internal dialog.
This is a pretty normal view. I've been a photographer and videographer since I was about 16, and worked freelance and in magazines all over my country before I got into teaching and IT.
If you read any film theory book, you'll eventually come accross Cahiers du Cinéma and André Bazin, one of the philosophers who most greatly influenced the Nouvelle Vague movement of cinema in France.
He would argue that the second you even point the camera at something, that's when the editing of reality starts. So in the end, what really matters, is the expression you're looking for. So work on that, and worry less about the tools you use to get there.
Many have since tried to challenge this view in various ways, including the Direct Cinema, and Cinema Verité movement, and even up to guys like Lars von Trier with his rather stringent Dogme manifesto. Because when you've mastered all other forms, the only way to challenge yourself is to give yourself artificial limits.
So do you morally have to say no to CG or photoshopping? Absolutely not. It's a tool like any other. You can use it to enhance the experience. And with todays digital cameras, it is often needed to glean the experience you had when watching the subject in real life, kind of like the expressionist painters of yore, who would strive to paint the feeling they had with the subject, rather than illustrate "the truth." Or you can willfully subject yourself to artificial limits, because it's a challenge.
With that said, I think the photos shown here reveals brilliant and inspired creativity with new techology and tools, and in the end, that's what it's about: To make something fantastic out of perhaps untraditional tools, either because it's a challenge, or because you have a grand vision—or both.
Anyway, I hope this gives you some inspiration to pick up your camera (any camera, even the one on your iPhone), and challenge yourself.
All the best!
Dabbled with similar photography (* not as good as Wu's), and think it would be a challenge to achieve similar results in Photoshop.
Light painting in the sky is one thing, but getting the light source to simultaneously "paint" the foreground in a realistic way -- so it's suggestive how the two physically interacted -- requires another level of PS wizardry (at least beyond me).
I think you may be able to achieve some nice results by stacking a bunch of exposures of the same scene from different times throughout the day and then use some various blend modes and masking to "paint" with the light.
Possibly. Luminosity masks work really well for bracketed exposures, but stacking different times of day introduces new problems (shadow angles, coloring) that I've struggled to adequately resolve. (Sure it's more a reflection my ability level.)
What's fun about drone lighting is that the detail is all 'real', with most of the 'art' going in the setup / staging. Really fun to see it executed well.
For me, the photos in the linked article look great no matter what the process was to create them. I don't see why they would lose their charm if they were CGI, simply because we tend to know whether we like a picture or not within a split second of first seeing it, while we generally don't know how they were made until later.
But for the pictures in the GP link, I don't think the pictures by themselves are all that interesting; to me almost the entire interest stems from knowing how they were made.
Somewhat comparable to pictures posted on HN a while back that went from "ho-hum, another portrait" to "that's actually interesting" by knowing that these were not real people or real photos, but rather computer generated portraits. (https://petapixel.com/2019/09/20/this-company-is-giving-away... )
So I think charm/appeal can stem from several sources, like pure visual impact, but it can also stem from an appriciation of the process behind it. And I see people sometimes change their minds on how well they like a picture - in either direction - based on how simple or complex they think the process was, even if the picture is identical. (Compare say a picture of a wild wolf pouncing its prey vs the same picture after you've learned that it's stuffed animals and the scene was arranged by the photographer.)
There is also something to be said about the subtle lighting when actually shooting such shots. Doing it with CG is perhaps approachable, but there is a point of diminishing returns when more and more time is spent to close that last few percent of the "realism" gap.
Case in point, I took this long exposure photo in about 15 seconds, provided a bit of setup and specialized hardware. A CG version would have taken (I think) hours and still not quite have the same subtleties in lighting.
https://imgur.com/e4UWiqz
For what it’s worth those images look like photo-shopped to me, too perfect, that’s why they don’t tell me anything (or close to anything). I’m not saying that they are digitally modified, but because they look close enough to that kind of photos then the interest is just not there anymore. The same way some person knowing/remembering all kind of minutiae is a lot less interesting compared to 40-50 years ago, we all now have access to google (i.e. a technical enhancement in our lives similar to what Photoshop means for images).
A simple and perhaps intellectually disappointing explanation is rarity: plenty of CGI with unnatural lighting, we value CGI that gets it right. Plenty of photographs with natural lighting, we value the photograph with an artificial tweak.
Good point. I think it’s a little more than that. Given a rare exceptional work of CG artist and an analog photographer’s rare works - vast majority of the people would gravitate towards the latter. It then leads me to think ease of access to tools (drone vs Photoshop), expediency in creating the works (a weekend shoot vs. 3 hours) and the costs ($400 trip + $800 drone vs. $29 Adobe subscription) is what makes it worthwhile? Is this type of art boiled down to the grunt work one has to do to achieve a result?
I personally resonate with conceptual art that abstracts away the physical processes and work on an ideological space (Francis Bacon, Milos Sobajic, Vladimir Velckovic, Shahabuddin Ahmed, etc). But that’s just me, and I certainly am not in a position to criticize anything in art. Just want to inquire and understand.
I think we (mostly) have the emphasis backwards, and that this is part of your discomfort. We like to focus on the artist, art-object, art-process, art-technique, art-tools, and art-temples.
I think it all makes more sense if you focus on the art-experience.
It is OK for something that wasn't intended as art--like a torn sign, or a true accidental technical glitch--to trigger an art-experience for you. It is OK if knowing--or not-knowing--details about a technique, technology, or process affects whether you have an art experience.
>I asked myself, would the same images, if rendered in CG or photoshopped, lose their charm/appeal? My conscience responds with a resounding "Yes". So, then the process itself must be the art and not the end result.
Taking a slightly different tack from the other responses so far: I don't think your second sentence there follows from your first. You are implicitly asserting that "rendered in CG or photoshopped" would and even could in fact produce the exact same art, and thus the process is the only differentiator. But I think an important limitation and value of doing this in the real world is that we cannot in fact actually perfectly reproduce the real world yet down to the visual spectrum limit. We can produce quite good facsimiles for sure, particularly zoomed out or in motion. But for high quality still photography of complex natural environments doing all the physics and replicating all the creation and weathering processes and so on exactly down to micron type levels is hard. Noting does reality like reality for the time being.
So I do think part of the charm/appeal here is precisely that the photographer is photographing something real, so you can really drill deep into the details with the knowledge that a human hand is revealing and highlighting those details, but did not craft them. Whereas with CG a human made decisions about every single bit of it (if only in choosing what algorithms/seeds were used or what result to accept for further work). Which itself can be extremely interesting! But they're genuinely two different things and I think do speak to different aspects of people.
I think to me a significant part is that one process boils down to a game of pushing numbers around (a fun and engaging game, certainly), and the other process requires physically engaging with the logistical difficulties of the world in a way that produces a more directly relatable story. That story may not be part of the image directly, but is sort of implied, and subjectively makes the photographs more immersive.
You need to know about the creative process and story though. Consider you saw one of these images in a gallery, with a label containing only a title - you might well assume the image was digitally altered. Without the context of how the image was created, is the image devalued in your mind?
My wife is an artist, and I struggle with these kind of questions; a seemingly simple image, painting, sculpture or object, might have been the result of weeks or months of creative process - but surely only the artist understands how it came to be?
It would be devalued. The beauty is in the contrast between the perfect geometric shapes painted by a drone and the natural landscape. It's almost alien seeing modern technology and nature coexisting in such a way.
A 3D artist I follow on Instagram has done similar things in CG, and I find them quite compelling. Admitedly the locations he sets them in are well-known to me, which probably amplifies the effect, but I think it's legitimately interesting work nonetheless.
Art stimulates
the non rational parta of the mind. Your conflict is due to your internal inconsistency, brought to the surface of your consciousness when you you brought your mind to bear on the impossible-looking photograph.
yea, this is the exact question i'm thinking in my mind. not knowing the source, would it make it more mysterious? would it make us conclude based on our presumptions - this is nothing but CG / wow cool... someone made long exposure. would it push to know about the creator more to inform the guessing? as an amateur photographer and art appreciator, there are lot of unknowns for me.
I love the fact that tech is so cheap that tinkerers can do some interesting things now. Light painting has been gaining from the simple use of a light source to illuminate something for long exposure photography for a while now. However, the creative means of lighting with the new toys that cheap tech is allowing for has made it even more fun to play. Also, the sensitivity of the new camera sensors make have helped.
I'm old school, my favorite light source for light painting is the full moon. Everything looks daylight until you notices the give tell-tales like smoothed out water to indicate long exposure, or night stars in the blue sky[0]. If timed correctly, you can get a moon strike which is where it starts while the moon is below horizon, and then the image starts to change as the moon rises[1]. I wish I had a link of live action video shot with nothing but moonlight.
If you have an actual budget, you can bring out enough lights to colorfully light up the side of a mountain[2]. (I have nothing to do with the making of this video)
While a lot of the tech so cheap, the cameras that Reuben uses cost 60K+ plus ;) He was the primary photographer phase one used to launch their new mirrorless/tech camera body.
Not that it probably makes a substantial difference in achievable end product probably.
Fair play, but camera prices are not part of the tech I was talking about. I come from the motion picture world, so a $60K+ camera is also quite cheap. I've used lenses that cost >$60K each, so maybe I'm desensitized to camera prices.
I was talking about cheap electronics to make the LED builds that make for cool blinky blinky things. OSS running on commodity hardware in the form of Arduino/Pi/etc allows for dependably repeatable motion control. For a few hundred dollars, you can make your camera appear to float and run all day on a single LiPo battery charge. You can literally make your camera fly with very affordable drones. You can buy BT/WiFi components so you control all of this with your phone. If you were a hacker 20 years ago, your inner youth would be drooling over this stuff.
dang! these are so creative. thanks for the pointer. i always wondered about capturing flights' time lapses. this is much harder than the flights. i wonder what inspired them.
Painting with light has long been used to make shadowless photographs of industrial and military components.[1] It's used there for clarity, not artistic effect.
This is a totally different style, but I have recently become a huge fan of James Turrell. There the light is "real" (i.e., it's not captured through photography), but often using naturally produced sunlight along with controlled colored light systems in tandem.
He's also building a massive art piece at Roden Crater. It's a big mind boggling no one has used it for a sci-fi movie yet. If you ever get a chance to see one his skyspaces or his artwork, I highly recommend it. It can be very entrancing and meditative.
Off-camera light and creative lighting are two of the most powerful ways to create surrealism in a medium that, in theory, if capturing what is literally happening in the real world. Realizing that photography literally means "writing with light" has inspired my dabbling in the hobby of photography more than anything else!
This is super-interesting conceptually, and fascinating to look at.
But I can't help but feel you could get exactly the same output by compositing daylight photos and gently photoshopping them in, as by compositing these drone-illuminated shots and layering them in.
When you're trying to achieve this type of artificiality anyways, this seems like an awfully expensive and complicated way to do it...
I initially agreed with you, but I think it would be hard to get the texture of the illumination correct. The quantity of light and how elements shade each other/etc, might be difficult to get right. For many applications it might not matter though
I've done a lot of landscape photography with natural light—daytime and nighttime—for the past twenty years. Daylight would look nothing like these.
It's easy to underestimate how sophisticated our intuitive subconscious perception of illumination is. We've evolved over millenia to have a really keen sense of different kinds of light and we can tell when things are different even if we aren't sure why.
You know what would really blow me away? If someone came up with a way to convert a 3D polygon mesh into a drone's flight path so that it could render any sort of 3D object into a scene with timelapse lighting. Light rendering.
Intel has a solution where you provide the 3D models (static or animated) and they automatically generate flight paths for dozens/ hundreds of drones, each acting as pixel/voxel. Of course with collision avoidance between them.
It's nice to see north Wales crop up on HN. Moel Tryfan and its quarry is one of many in the locality. I'd usually call it unremarkable, but this photo has taken it to somewhere else.
Typically, your light painting source is very low power so that it builds up over the course of the exposure without over exposing. Doing long exposure with people is hard. The subject would be required to stand extremely still. Any movement will cause the subject to be blurry as they will literally be appearing in multiple places within the image. If the subject moves too fast, they will completely disappear from the image. We use this technique frequently in music videos. I've also experimented with using flash strobes to expose the subject in the split second even though the shutter remains open. At that point, your subject can move out of frame and still be exposed from the flash.
Likely a web-server misconfiguration (check out name-based virtual hosting[0]). Adding a trailing dot after the TLD (this signifies the root of the DNS naming hierarchy) works fine, and you're referring now to an absolute name (FQDN). How this get handled afterwards at the webserver side, depends not just on the resolved IP, but on the name itself (which is passed from client to server in the HTTP Host: header). And that's where this might fall apart if the administrator didn't provide for this situation.
They are gorgeous, but I debate brilliance. Pretty much any introductory class to photography covers "light painting" - long exposure, fixed subject, movable light source.
(I don't say this to distract from the artistry, just to point out it's a well-known technique, and halos are on the more common side when painting with light)
As beautiful as the images are, I can't help but wonder if we really want to be running loud, bright drones in the middle of the only quiet, peaceful areas that still exist.
If it helps at all, the article mentions that the photographer uses exposures "as long as 30 seconds," so these drones aren't in the air all that long. Unless and until hundreds of copycat drone-light photographers start swarming deserts and lakes, I don't feel too bad about the light and noise pollution incurred to produce this shockingly creative landscape photography. Besides, I bet the effects of a single drone flying for a few minutes pales in comparison to the headlights, engine sounds, and emissions of the car used to get to and from the photo location.
These are in a lot of places where you must get permission/ permits for any kind of commercial drone photography, and at night too, so this will probably not big as a big a nuisance as just normal people tooling around with drones wherever they live.
This is nothing new. There are various areas of professional photography that have long used long exposures to selectively add light. Sometimes called "flashlight painting", the photographer can use a literal flashlight to fill in shadow areas selectively during a long exposure.
This can produce images that are not physically possible using static light sources. The use of a drone over landscapes is a simple extension of this longstanding studio technique.
> The idea was born from a mistake. One night near Death Valley, California, Wu set a camera to make a time-lapse series in the dark. A pickup truck drove by and washed out the scene with its harsh headlights.
> At first, says Wu, “I was really annoyed. But when I looked at the images, I was fascinated. Here was artificial lighting in a natural environment.”
The quote above indicates that Wu stumbled upon the technique by accident but, sandworm101 is correct, this technique has been known and widely used for decades. I know the technique as "painting with light" and a Google image search should convince any skeptics. Add "stars" to the search and you will see that the technique is often combined with star trails.
Using drones is a nice enhancement. The criticism about originality doesn't make Wu's images any less spectacular.
EDIT: The Luminous-Landscape article Introduction to Landscape Astrophotography [1] includes a section on "Light Painting".
Maybe Wu didn’t know about light painting before this happened. A lot of people rediscover things. I found out by accident that you can see the Milky Way in all its glory when you do long exposures.
But yes, this is an old technique. I guess the big difference is that drones can write shapes into the air and also reach locations and angles you can’t reach with traditional light painting.
I feel like this comment has some good content and could hold its own without this statement. It just feels a little antagonistic. Everything has been done before, we're all on the shoulders of giants.
This is no different from the "first" comments in youtube or when sharing a meme to a friend that has already seen it and says "I've seen that already" instead of discussing essence of the content itself.
