May 6, 2007

Michael Wesely

michaelwesley.jpg
One of the many things I love about early photographs of seemingly empty street scenes is the slight blur that comes from the people who were passing by during the long exposures. Michael Wesely does modern versions of those long exposures taking the technique to the extreme sometimes leaving the shutters on his custom constructed cameras open for months or even years at a time. In the longest exposures people vanish completely, but the sun and moon leave streaks in the sky...

While his website features obtuse navigation and an extremely poorly coded javascript that occasionally hangs Safari and slows Firefox to a crawl, the site is still worth exploring for it's visually rich and thought provoking images which include still lives and motion studies in addition to the landscapes...

The image above was taken over two years during the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz... (via Pruned)

related: PBS interview

posted at 01:13 AM by raul

Filed under: photographers

TAGS: german (4) long exposure (3) photography (58) potsdamer platz (1) sun (1) time (25)

Comments:

05/07/07 11:49 PM

I'd surely like to know more about how he does these. I don't think they are continuous exposures, nor perhaps are they single negatives. But I can't say I know. There is something more going on here than just setting a camera down some place and leaving the shutter open for days, months, years. Questions out of intellectual curiosity & a feeble attempt to make the images' appearances jibe with my understanding of how photography works.

05/08/07 07:17 AM

My understanding is that they are single exposures taken with a large format camera stopped all the way down with many neutral density filters stacked on top...

05/14/07 11:15 AM

I really had no idea you could do that, even with specially constructed cameras. Wow.

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