Every now and then comes a photographer who does something new and unique. And every now and then I feature some of them on this blog.

Today I’d like to introduce you all to a Hamburg-based photographer, Adde Adesokan, whose stunning Triptychs of Strangers have recently attarcted a lot of attention on sites like Google+ and Flickr.

Adde takes street portraits of strangers. But instead of traditional portraits, he creates triptychs, where in one image he combines three close-ups of his subject’s face, hips (or general midriff area) and feet. I couldn’t resist asking Adde a few questions and I started by asking how he came up with the idea for Triptychs of Strangers:

I came up with the idea while looking at normal triptych artworks around an exhibition. I tried and posted the first stranger without a description but with time I developed a writing style too to make those strangers even more unique and to stress what I tried to reveal about their personality in the pictures.

How difficult do you find it to convince people to participate?

Not that difficult. It really depends on your idea, yourself and experience. People are really excited about the idea itself or when I show them a few examples. I end up talking to my strangers for about 20 minutes, sometimes up to two hours. Most of them are flattered if you ask them about how they get along and stuff.

Then comes your experience – don’t push to much. Don’t talk to people in groups (individuals seek group-approval), don’t ask for 10 minutes of their time if it’s raining heavily – and offer to delete the photos in case they don’t like them.

A lot of your images – including this project – are street images. Why street photography?

I would say 99% is street. I love people in the streets – whether you get in touch with your subjects or not. I enjoy these moments in life and photography is a good thing to record them.

How long have you been doing photography?

One year. I was in London a year ago visiting my cousin and the city. Unfortunately his time was rather short, so I had to kill some time. This is how things started.

Image © Adde Adesokan, used with author’s permission

I was in South Africa, in the middle of the African bush, and one night while sitting by the fire we looked up and saw this:

It does put everything into perspective. You realise where you are in the Universe, or rather how insignificant you are in the context of what’s around you.

I had my DSLR with me, but I didn’t have a fast lens. I was ready for animal shots in the bright African sunshine, but not for long exposures in the middle of the night. That’s why the above image doesn’t do The Milky Way I saw any justice. It was multi-coloured, really rich, dense and indescribably beautiful.

If you’ve never seen the Milky Way in real life, the following timelapse video is a pretty good substitute.

It was filmed between 4th and 11th April 2011 by Terje Sorgjerd atop El Teide, Spain´s highest mountain. As he wrote, the mountain “is one of the best places in the world to photograph the stars and is also the location of Teide Observatories, considered to be one of the world´s best observatories. The goal was to capture the beautiful Milky Way galaxy along with one of the most amazing mountains I know El Teide.”

And the result is breathtaking. As always with Vimeo, go full screen and don’t miss the Sahara sandstorm some 30 seconds in:

The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

And if you liked it, here’s another video Terje shot – at the famous Maeklong Market in Bangkok, where market stalls share their space with a railway line. Life on this planet has so many amazing aspects…

This guy used a tripod and his Canon 5D Mk II, plus a 16-35mm lens, to create a 2-minute timelapse movie during his flight from San Francisco to Paris. It all starts with a few glimpses of San Francisco itself, but then it gets awesome when he captures the Northern Lights:

Mesmerising.

Although, as you can imagine, it probably wasn’t the easiest timelapse to shoot. On his YouTube page he said:

“Thanks to my neighbors for not minding an SLR click every 2 to 30 seconds for 11 hours, and thanks to the whole Air France flight crew for being insanely friendly and allowing me to shoot.”

And here I was, thinking that the most exciting thing on an overnight flight was the latest episode of 30 Rock.

via JPG Magazine

As soon as the medium of photography was invented, people started taking photographs in the street. Mind you, initially they didn’t have much choice. The first cameras were so bulky and exposure times so long that it perhaps made sense to stand in the middle of London and take advantage of natural light.

And indeed, the first images you see when you visit the superb “London Street Photography” exhibition, which has just opened at the Museum of London in the City, are quite blurry thanks to long exposure times. It’s fascinating to see that, in terms of the subject matter, what London-based photographers and visitors to the city upload to Flickr or capture via Instagram in 2011 doesn’t differ that much – broadly speaking, of course – from what the forefathers of street photography captured 150 years ago.

The crowds, the buzz the city generates, the odd characters, the various social classes and behaviours have always attracted crowds of people wanting to capture all that for posterity. This hasn’t changed much. But what has changed is the perspective.

The 19th century “early adopters” documented the city itself – its vastness, grandness, its architecture and vitality. Some of them also already tried to document certain aspects of London’s life. As you progress through the exhibition you notice how the focus shifts from large scenes to more intimate moments, where London – while still recognisable – defines and shapes the subjects and their behaviours, but doesn’t dominate the scene.

I’m still mesmerised by a mini-collection of images by Wolf Suschitzky. There were just three images of Charing Cross Road he took in 1937 and I absolutely loved them. Make sure you spend some time listening to Suschitzky himself, who talks about street photography in a video played in one of the rooms.

The Museum of London has collected these street photographs over the years and eventually decided to share some of them with the wider public this year. Strangely, many people didn’t even know about this exhibition, which is a shame. But it’s open till early September, so there’s plenty of time to visit. Do so.

My prayers have been answered. London eventually got its first decent gigapixel image this week. You’ve probably already seen what its creator calls the biggest spherical panoramic image in the world at the moment, the 80-gigapixel picture of London.

It’s an amazing achievement. The level of detail is incredible – you can clearly see individual faces in the street, peer into cluttered offices and count the number of tourists in each of the London Eye’s pods.

Jeffrey Martin who created this image, and who runs 360cities.net, took some time out of his very busy schedule to answer a few questions for this blog. Here’s what he had to say about the image, but also about his other projects, including 3D and timelapse panoramas:

First of all, explain how you took the image(s) and how you worked on the final picture.

I took 4 panoramas (about 30 gigapixels each) from each corner of the Centrepoint skyscraper in London and stitched them teogher into a single 80 gigapixel image.

Many people cannot really imagine such a gigantic image. Could you explain what 80 gigapixels mean in the context of this project.

80 billion pixels is the equivalent of 400,000 x 200,000 pixels. A normal camera might give you a picture that is 4,000 x 3,000 pixels. I joined nearly 8000 images together. If you took this image to the photolab and printed it like you print your holiday photos at the photolab (or on a good inkjet printer at home) the image would be 35m x 17m in size – and not a billboard, which is just dots when you get close to it. this would be something you could press your nose against and still see detail.

So the next obvious question would be about your gear…

I used an 18 megapixel SLR camera (Canon 550D, but they didn’t sponsor this image) and a 400mm lens. I used the 18 megapixel SLR because it has the smallest pixels (highest pixel density) of any digital SLR on the market, allowing the largest possible panorama in terms of pixel count.

I’ve written about many other gigapixel images before – it all started with Dresden and Paris, then there was Dubai and Budapest and many others. Did they inspire you in any way? What did you think about them?

I made another world record image last year, the Prague Gigapixel – http://www.360cities.net/prague-18-gigapixels at about the same time, the Dresden image came out, larger but not a 360. The Paris image is wonderful. Holger who made the Dresden image, and Alexandre Jenny (and his colleagues from Kolor) who took part in the Paris image I have met a few times. They are all great guys, once or twice a year we get a chance to meet at a panoramic photographer conference, and we get to talk about all this geek stuff

What was the most challenging part of the project?

The stress of not knowing if this was going to work at all! These other world record images were shot from a single point, and from that standpoint were much more straightforward to do (I won’t use the word “easy”) This image was shot from 4 quite different viewpoints, but the subject matter was mostly quite distant, but still the way to get them to fit together well is one of my trade secrets I guess.

So we’ve had panoramic images, spherical panoramic images, what’s coming next? 3D? Interactive panoramas?

Some people call spherical panoramas “3D” which they are not – they are 2Dphotos on a spherical surface. You can have 3D spherical panoramas also, and we have some on 360cities.net: www.360cities.net/search/anaglyph (you need red-blue 3D glasses to see these) It is geometrically impossible to make a completely spherical anaglyph panorama because when you look down the 3D effect breaks. But it mostly works. I personally don’t like to wear these red-blue glasses. Until this can be shown without any glasses, I think it is kept to a very tiny niche.

I have dabbled in timelapse spherical panoramas – back in 2005 when I had more time on my hands. I shot 6 spherical panoramas from the *exact* same spot, every few days, for a whole year – there was even a flood! You can see them here. You need the adobe shockwave plugin to see these, and your browser might crash – but it’s worth the risk
http://www.vrlog.net/2007/11/timelapse-panoramas/

It’s fascinating, but tell me a bit more about 360cities.net

I founded 360cities with my brother David, 4 years ago. It grew out of a local project called Prague360.com which I worked on with the supremely talented designer Adam Trachtman (of www.lucidcircus.cz)

After we made the Prague site, google maps came out and we thought “hey, we can clone this for anywhere in the world” so we did just that. I invited other panoramic photography enthusiasts to publish their own images, and it started with 7 cities. And it grew from there. In 2007 we received Angel funding, and it became my full time job (more than fulltime – running a startup is crazy!)

I can imagine. What’s next for you and for the site then? Which city is next and are you hoping to set another world record?

I’d love to keep making world records, it’s fun Next could be Mumbai, or NYC, or Istanbul. Who knows? You’ll be surprised!

All images in this post © Jeffrey Martin, used with permission. Thanks to @anniemole for help

Related articles

• 80 Gigapixel 360 Degree Panorama of London Largest of Its Kind (petapixel.com)
• “London venue for the world’s largest panoramic photo” and related posts (pocket-lint.com)
• Panoramic pic captures London at 80 gigapixels (news.cnet.com)

It’s been bothering me for quite a while: why is it that so many online publications seem to be proud of their picture galleries and attach so much importance to the visual aspect of news, yet completely ruin the experience by presenting the images in a very unattractive way?

Yes, I know that page impressions count and if you reduce the gallery size, cram a few ads on the page and make people click forever you may even earn a few bucks. But will the same people come back?

I may look at the galleries on Times Online, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph every now and then, but usually only when I get sent a link to one. I hardly ever look at the BBC galleries, although I have to admit that I like the fact their home page has become flexible and can easily accommodate a large(ish)-format gallery to illustrate a big breaking news story.

I know that not everybody uses huge screens and enjoys a fast broadband connection, and I’m fully aware of the fact that most news outlets need or want to appeal to the widest audience. But how about making the images bigger, the gallery visually more appealing and likely to be shared easily? At least try?

That’s exactly what boston.com did and subsequently conquered the social media world with its Big Picture gallery – massive, bold, carefully selected images focused on a single theme.

Ask any Twitter user whether they’ve heard of Boston.com and they will probably say no. But ask them about The Big Picture and they’re more likely to remember it.

In a relatively short space of time The Big Picture has become an institution – a place to go to to see carefully selected examples of photojournalism, extreme photography, some quirky and unusual images – all in big format.

And, unlike most online galleries, this one needs to be scrolled rather than clicked through. That’s possibly its biggest unique selling point: no thumbnails, no individual pages, no pop-ups. Just a long list of visually stunning and often poigniant images. A big win for both photography and for journalism, but not just because of the big format. The images are always carefully selected to guarantee the most logical narrative or simply the biggest visual impact, or both.

Another exemplary use of big format photographs can be found on the brilliant Pictory site, where users are invited to submit just one image on a specific theme. Laura Brunow, who runs the website, then picks twelve best images and publishes them as brilliant image-led ‘stories’. See this Danger showcase for example. A clean, uncluttered and easy to navigate page, where images are able to speak for themselves and grab our attention. Each comes with a short intro or caption submitted by the contributing photographer and with the photographer’s bio.

The fact that many Twitter users – not necessarily photographers – shared a link to the recent London showcase, and had nothing but praise for the site, suggests Laura Brunow (and The Big Picture) got it right.

The big boys should really take notice.

First of all you need the water, which at this time of the year can still be frozen. There are also years when there’s simply no water as it’s too dry.

Then you also need sunlight. The sky needs to be clear and the setting sun needs to be in the right position for its golden glow to hit the falling water.

And obviously the photographer needs to be there at the right time in the right place.

Absolutely fascinating. And I didn’t know about that until I read what others had to say about it on Flickr. When you search for ‘horsetail firefall’ there you can also see how others have approached the same phenomenon.

I think I know when I’m going next February.

Image: Horsetail Firefall© Daleberts via Flickr, used under CC licence

It would seem 26-gigapixel panoramic websites are all the rage. You may remember my earlier post from December 2009 on a similar site offering some mind-blowing views of Dresden, but it looks like this latest site takes the whole experience to a whole new level.

Not least because of the beauty of the next city which got the 26-gigapixel treatment: Paris.

Like their German counterparts, the French photographers – led by Arnaud Frich, “the most famous panoramic photographer in France” – also used Canon 5D Mark II. But to speed the process up they used 2 cameras to capture 2346 single images, which they then stitched together to create what they claim is the biggest ever panoramic image. For comparison, the Dresden project used ‘only’ 1600 images.

They shot the image from the top of Saint Sulpice tower using 300mm f4.0 lenses with tele converters and used manual focus. During the shoot one of the lenses started producing blurred images, so they finished the project with just one camera.

When you compare the two processes, the French one is much less complicated, and possibly less perfectly executed (there are some image quality issues here and there), but the result is stunning. You can zoom in on some of the French capital’s most popular buildings, track down pedestrians on the narrow Parisian streets or count the tourists on top of the Eiffel Tower.

Like with the Dresden project, you can also click on some thumbnails and let the screen zoom in on a particular detail. Clicking on any of the info points on the screen will bring up a short description of what you are looking at. And luckily you can mute the slightly annoying Amelie music.

As always, it’s best viewed on a relatively fast machine and definitely go full screen.

The accompanying blog gives more details about the project, there’s also a short  behind-the-scenes video.

We’ll no doubt see more gigantic panoramic pictures soon. The question is – which city is up next?

New York? Tokyo? Or, hopefully, London.

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• Now it’s time to see Dubai–in 45 gigapixels (news.cnet.com)

And preferably go full screen if you can.

Did you like it? I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen on Vimeo in a long time.

But what’s really striking about this video is the fact that it’s fully computer-generated. None of it is real. It’s all animated.

As the author of the video, Alex Roman, says: “The Third and The Seventh is a full-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects
are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal.”

The website for the project, www.thirdseventh.com, describes it as “the visual fusion between the third and the seventh arts.”

Alex Roman is an artistic alias of a 30-year-old Spanish artist Jorge Seva, who studied traditional painting, then worked for a visual effects company in Madrid before developing an interest in architectural visualisation.

In one interview he explained the concept and the title:

I realized that there was a huge aesthetic difference between most clients’ commercial demands and photography of already-built structures. The lack of respect for the architecture itself in some “pure” commercial illustration was very frustrating to me. (Well, this is just my opinion, of course.)

Then, I decided to start a personal journey: to experiment with a more cinematographic and/or photographic oriented point of view of some of my favorites architects’ masterpieces.

Hence, the “TheThird&TheSeventh” project…

You can read the rest of the interview here – he explains some technical details regarding the video.

You have to admit, the video is simply stunning. I can’t begin to imagine the amount of effort and patience required to put the whole thing together. I think I’ll stop moaning about my RAW workflow now.

It also shows what is possible in 2010 and actually when you think about it – it makes you wonder how much of what we see is real – and when it matters. If at all.

I went to see the new Sherlock Holmes and half of the movie was computer-generated, but it didn’t bother me at all, it was good fun.

There might be situations however when this sort of CG footage might be problematic – factual or news footage springs to mind. Sooner or later it will happen.

But I guess this is just the beginning – in five year’s time Avatar and Wall-e will look dated. And I’d rather celebrate the fact we’re able to create such amazing things.

Alex Roman, I salute you!

Here he talks to me about in more detail about his project and the inspiration behind it:

The project started soon after I arrived in London in 2005. I’m a street photography fan and From the Upper Deck is weird version of street photography. The view from double-decker buses fascinated me from the moment I arrived in London. I’ve always taken pictures from buses, sadly I lost the very early ones when my hard drive died some time ago. (Three low-res images survived here http://plfoto.com/730749/zdjecie.html http://plfoto.com/765776/zdjecie.html http://plfoto.com/777852/zdjecie.html – these were my first pictures from the upper deck.)

After a while the whole idea grew into a project and in 2007 I decided to ride every bus route in London from the first to the last stop. The following year I started my photo blog.

What camera are you using? Do you stick to just one lens or do you change them?

Currently I’m using Canon 5D and a Canon 50mm f 1.8 lens. The 5D allows me to take good quality pictures at very short intervals, which is a great bonus when photographing the street from a moving bus. Plus it’s a full-frame camera too. 99% of all my pictures were taken with the 50mm lens. In my opinion the 50mm focal length manages the task best and is ideal for me. And besides the 50mm is like cheap wine. Why is cheap wine is good? Because it’s cheap and good.

I agree, I love my 50mm f1.8 lens. Incredible quality for such low price. Which aspect of this project do you find difficult, what’s the biggest challenge for you?

I don’t look at it this way. It’s difficult to say what the most difficult thing is. Most things about taking pictures are exciting. The most boring – and therefore the most difficult aspect – is not getting lost in all the information: when and where I’ve been, which route I’ve covered… All that admin stuff (two spreadsheets, calendar) is very ungrateful, but I need to remember where and when I’ve visited. The biggest challenge is getting on every single double-decker route in London from the beginning to the end.

Have you ever met with a negative reaction? Or do people prefer to pose for pics?

Usually people don’t see me. But when they do, they react in various ways – they’re surprised, they smile, they seem reluctant. But there has never been a negative reaction – maybe just surprise. Here are some examples:

http://www.ftud.net/p/494
http://www.ftud.net/p/87
http://www.ftud.net/p/357

Has this project changed the way you perceive London and its inhabitants?

No, although I’ve seen places I never knew existed, mainly on the outskirts of London – places like Purley, Biggin Hill or Hillingdon.

How was the project received by other photographers and the general poblic?

I think the feedback was positive. The project was picked up by the BBC website and other blogs/online publications, including a prominent German site I never knew existed

How many routes have you got left to cover and how are you planning to cover those without double-decker buses?

I don’t know exactly how many as not all of them  have double-deckers. I think I’ll simply ignore those.

What’s the next step for the project?

The main aim is to publish an album then to re-edit and rebuilt the website to allow for easier picture browsing.

You can follow Przemek on Twitter and check his site www.ftud.net

All images © Przemek Wajerowicz, used with author’s permission