There’s movement in everything and by capturing that plus the great things about a still photograph you get to experience what a video has to offer without the time commitment a video requires. There’s something magical about a still photograph — a captured moment in time — that can simultaneously exist outside the fraction of a second the shutter captures.
— Photographer Jamie Beck explains the cinemagraph to The Atlantic
GIFs were my introduction to image manipulation; I used a trial version of Adobe ImageReady on the family computer to make AIM buddy icons in Microsoft Paint back in the AOL days. And I’ve been really interested in the beautiful, arresting use of animated GIFs that have come to be known as cinemagraphs, but haven’t had the time or energy to go through the process of layering and masking and animating in photoshop.
I recently stumbled across Cinemagra.am, a free iPhone app that does most of the yeoman’s work in putting together a cinemagraph, though. Just shoot a quick video and draw a mask on your touch screen and you have your own cinemagraph, like this one:
The software is a little janky and takes some getting used to, but essentially it allows you to isolate elements of your video to animate, freezing the rest of the shot in one frame. Above, the guitar is played as the rest of the scene sits still. The isolated motion is arresting at first, but it’s quite beautiful as it repeats, playing forward and then in reverse. Here’s another:
For some examples of the best this strange little medium has to offer, check out Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg’s site, cinemagraphs.com, and watch PBS’s mini-documentary “Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium.”
Nieman Lab: Typographic capitals: ProPublica shares a tool for easy state maps
Jersey is a lower case “e” for those of you keeping score at home.
This afternoon, I took Rosie up the Palisades Interstate Parkway to the State Line Lookout, which sits on the cliffs between New York and New Jersey.
After a quick hike, we crossed the border into New York and found some pretty breathtaking vistas overlooking the Hudson River. I was taking some photos on my phone when the fella up top walked into my frame. A minute or two later, Rosie called over to me to look up and I popped off a few frames on my SLR.
It looked like a bald eagle, but I don’t really know much about birds.
“That’s a bald eagle,” said the guy in my frame. He had a pair of binoculars and a brimmed hat with one side flipped up, so I’m inclined to trust his judgment on matters ornithological.
He said he’d been watching some buzzards on the other side of the ridge when the sound of my shutter caught his attention, just as the eagle headed off southbound. “They’re up and down here all day,” he said, adding that they probably nested not far from where we were standing, on a cliff just past the Jersey side on the Palisades.
“But exactly where is probably a closely guarded secret,” he said.
Today in Reporterdom: The state of the county address.
One of the great things about my job is that I’m given a lot of freedom to tinker with how we cover things. There’s no reason in my mind to write an inverted pyramid-style newspaper story or a play-by-play about a speech, an event that addresses a lot of important issues but has virtually no narrative arc.
Rehashing the whole thing wrapped in quotes seems pretty redundant, too, when you can just link to the full text, so my approach was a ‘takeaways’-style post with video highlights. Some technical difficulties have delayed the videos from being displayed, but I’m told the’ll show up, ahem, eventually. Stay tuned.
[Story]
Sunderland, MA.
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