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An Attempt at Exhausting A Park In Pittsburgh

When Ginger came to teach us spectroscopy, and we were asked to collect samples outside to look at under a microscope, I unexpectedly discovered a microscopic bug when looking at a leaf from outside (I could’t see it with my plain, human eyes). This made me curious about what else I was missing. Then, for my first project, I spent so much time in Schenley Park (I was trying to exhaust it- à la Perec). In how many ways could I get to know Schenley Park? What was interesting in it?

In October, I collected a bunch of samples (algae from Panther Hollow lake, flowers, twigs, rocks, leaves, etc.) and brought them to the studio to see what I could find in a deeper look. Below is a short video highlighting only a small portion of my micro explorations. A lot of oohs, ahh, and silliness.

Last week, Richard Pell told us about focus stacking! I wanted to try using this technique to make higher resolution images from some of my videos. While the images are not super high resolution because they are made from extracted video stills, you are still able to see more detail in one image with the stacking. I ran a bunch of my captures through heliconFocus to achieve this. Below are my focus stack experiments along with GIFs of the original footage to show the focus depth changing.

Focus Stacking Captures:

  1. Pollinated Flower Petals.

Focus Stacking – Blue Flower

Focus Stacking – Dry Moss

Focus Stacking – Bugs on Flowers


 

You can see the movement of the bug over time like this!!

I also did this with a tiny bug I saw on this leaf, you can see its path.

Next, you can see some bugs moving around on this flower

Now Mold!

A single strand of moss

 

A flower bud


Having done these microscopic captures for fun in October and really enjoying this close-up look at things, and being so mesmerized by the bugs lives, I wanted to spend an extraordinary amount of time just looking at the same types of bugs found on Schenley organic matter for my final project. On November 25th, I set out again to collect a plethora of objects from Schenley Park- including flowers, strands of grass, twigs, acorns, stones, algae+water from the pond, charred wood and more… I eagerly brought them to studio… wondering what bugs I’d see. But of course, it had gotten cold. After an hours-long search under the microscope, I did find one bug. But by the time I found the bug, I was exhausted (and interested in other things).

In an Attempt at Exhausting A Park In Pittsburgh. (Schenley Park), I ended up exhausting myself.

 

Pocket Postulating

I was interested in trying the “slit scan” app, which I quickly realized makes for interesting effects when capturing something in motion (not as interesting when there isn’t movement). What’s interesting about capturing motion is that as a photographer, you should decide if you are going to move the camera, or if you are going to keep the camera still and capture something that is moving, or both. I have been working on group projects on campus all day, and I was having trouble thinking of a subject or set of subjects whose motion I could capture. I was trying to capture people moving around me, but that didn’t seem like a cohesive set. So I decided to instead capture myself in movement because I could be a clear and consistent subject. In the slit scan selfies below, I took selfies while walking around different places on campus. While I’m not the most avid selfie-taker, I do think that taking selfies this way allowed for a wider display of my different sorts of dispositions – of course my face and it’s expression is distorted in these, but I think that the variety of expressions that you can see here are greater than the variety of expressions there would have been if I had just taken regular selfies instead. I’m planning to try slit scan again for other objects in motion. Maybe tomorrow if I go for a run, I’ll take a pause and use it to capture some of the runners around me from a constant place.

slit scan selfies

Tomorrow I am also planning to take some panoramic photos as well as Timelapse photos. For the Timelapse photos my first idea is to take Timelapse photos of drinks or dishes with foods and liquids in the that are being consumed. Not sure if this a subject I can capture in a day, but I will try! For the panoramic photos I’m thinking my subject could be the streets I walk along on my way to campus. ~till tomorrow!

 

While walking to class, I became interested in the motion of various shadows. The wind was subtle, so I wanted to exaggerate and speed up the motion by taking a Timelapse. These photos were more interesting to me than the panoramic photos I took (where I was trying to catch the same car from two views). Above is a sample of the flickering plant shadows and below are couple of my failed car panoramas.