Friday, April 15, 2011

Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years.


There are other videos on YouTube of people taking everyday photos of themselves and blending them into a sort of time lapse video. I think this one is the best. 

It's like time is swirling all around Noah, almost as if he were in a river. The changes in his background are fast and dramatic: light, people, locations, but the changes on his appearance are subtle (except for his hair). He gains some weight, his forehead recedes, he seems to grow sad, then recover. I'm not sure why, but I've been thinking about this video all week.

Other similar videos are OK, but lack the power of this one for various reasons. In one a teenaged girl pays no attention to lighting, or anything else really, and its disjointed, confusing. In order to make it work the lighting has to be consistent for a good number of frames and the 'triangle' of the face (eyes, nose, mouth) need to be in the same position time after time.

Another guy tried his hand at it. He seemed to shoot each photo after getting out of the shower everyday. I know why, he was lining his face and head up with the tiles behind him, using them as a grid. So you see his appearance through time, and only his appearance. In order for it to work the face has to remain reasonably steady while life swirls and spins around behind. 

And of course there's an App for this. It's called - what else? - "EveryDay'. It works on iPhone4. It will remind you at set times to take a photo, then uses your phone camera to take the picture. The previous day's photo is ghosted on your screen so you can line up your head to keep consistency. Looks like it would work.


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Elmira, New York, United States
In many ways I think like a photographer. The image itself is becoming more and more important to me; the actual application of paint less and less. Blasphemy in some painterly circles. I choose to paint figures and portraits because I consider them the most difficult subject.

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