Behind the Photo: Ellwood 4D

The video below is a behind the scenes look at one of my first 4D composites I made after moving to California in 2013. A short bike ride from my apartment brought me to this iconic beach bluff lookout. I brought camping supplies to take a nap next to my camera while it took a 5-6 hour long time lapse of the star trails into the morning. The video first shows the two raw time-lapses that I captured and then presents a simplified look at the steps I took to selectively stack and blend those thousands of layers together into one composite image. Instead of showing the entire trial and error process I just chose just to show the layers that resulted from my experimenting. Things that seem to just “appear” (like the birds) were manually masked out from another moment in time. Nothing in the final image was artificially added, I only combined real moments from this location.

Song: First Snow – Emancipator

Technical jargon if you’re into that kind of thing: The exact number of layers that ended up being included in this particular composite is 1,997. There were actually over 6,000 individual photos taken for the purpose of this shoot but of those only a third ended up contributing to the final picture. As you may notice, there are composites within composites within composites. This shot utilized two different forms of time-stacking to capture the movement of objects. The star trails alone were comprised of over 1,400 photos taken over a 5-hour period. The rest were from a three hour time-lapse at sunset in which I selectively blended the light and cloud streaks. Digging even further – each “photo” from the sunset time-stack was actually an HDR blend of 3 raw exposures.

Between shooting, and editing of the photograph and video I spent over 50 hours on this project.