Anssi Ranki's Red Clock

By Dave Sailer

The latest issue of Popular Photography has a story on the work of Finnish photographer Anssi Ranki, showing another of the possibilities of non-Photoshop, non-pasted-up, non-multiple-printed, i.e., in-camera "manipulation."

The best image I could find was "Red Clock," the one published in the magazine, though Ranki does have a website with this and some other, less accomplished work on it.

Anssi Ranki, Red Clock

According to Popular Photography he uses a dark sheet of card stock with a slit cut into it. This, with long exposure times, allows him to move the slit between the subject and camera while manipulating the subject during the exposure.

So these are "straight" photographs, right? Representing actual reality, right? That is, exactly what the camera sees, right? Even if they look goofy, right?

From the site: "OneFrameCinema is more than a still photograph. It is a movie experience in one frame. To create this sensation, a still camera has been used much like a movie camera, recording the live action by one continuous exposure. There is absolutely no picture manipulation or 'photoshopping.'"

A Google search for "Anssi Ranki" also led to another website, "M5 Time," though I couldn't find his name anywhere there. These images are of cars, and seem more ordinary (I guess until one tries to duplicate them). The style is similar to some images on the first web site, but look more like advertising photos.

From M5 Time: "The M5 establishes a time concept of its own. The raw speed, combined with the unparalleled driving experience and luxurious comfort, make the longest of journeys seem to pass in the blink of an eye. In an effort to capture this sensation with a camera, the pictures in this gallery have been shot with exceptionally long exposure time. Moments that have elapsed several minutes have become compressed into a single instant. No digital post-processing or 'photoshopping' has been applied to achieve the illusion. A new dimension has been discovered. Welcome to M5 Time."

For what it's worth...

_______________

Dave

Featured Comment by Blake Andrews: "An interesting effect. From the description, it sounds like what he is doing is remarkably similar to the way swinglens panoramic cameras (Widelux & Noblex) work. Instead of a conventional shutter, these cameras make exposures through a vertical slit which rotates across the frame of film. When the rotation is slow enough and when the camera or elements in the photo are in motion during the exposure, you get similar effects to the Melting Clock photo. I've experimented a lot with this technique. You can see some examples here. Another good place to see this style is in Michael Ackerman's book End Time City.

Blake Andrews, YMCA, February, 2003

Comments

[RC]

I like the clock. The other stuff on the site is pretty ho-hum. Reminds me though, of that guy who photographs groups of racing cars with a custom Hasselblad which exposes long strips of film, essentially through a slit. His trick is to approximately synchronize the speed of the motor driven film with the speed of the cars so that the cars come out not too stretched or compressed. The cars are sharp but the background is blurred. The results are pretty impressive, for pictures of groups of racing cars. Sorry I didn't bookmark it so I could include a link.

[erlik]

What amuses me is that I was fiddling with creating exactly such image in 3D several years ago. Exactly - composition, the cabinet, clock...

Ah, well. I guess I'm not the only one who saw Dali's paintings. :-)

[Bruce Robbins]

Salvador Dali is to Anssi Ranki what Anssi Ranki is to Photoshop users. And it's all bollocks anyway.

[Fred]

Just been looking at the "Melting clock" - isn't it funny how the apparent imperfection, the blurriness along the bend, seems to the viewer as "proof" that these images are not indeed photoshopped ?
One starts to think, well if they were digitally manipulated, he would certainly have done a better job than this...

Some of the photos are very good. I wish he would publish an article illustrating how exactly it is done.

As a side note: Check out http://www.adobe.com/misc/trade.html#photoshop

... The Photoshop trademark must never be used as a common verb or as a noun. ...

I suppose they are doing this to protect their Photoshop trademark against what happened to Sony's "Walkman".

[Paul Van]

Somewhere on my travels on the net, I encountered this same idea in reverse. The photographer used a large-format film camera, and replaced the film with a scanner - in essence the moving slit was at the film plane. Very interesting results; stationary objects looked normal, but anything that moved was distorted.
Sorry I can't remember who it was or exactly where I saw it.

[Ctein]

Mike,

Yeah, elegantly-done work. And apropos your meta-theme...

In the previous pointless debate about "what is photography?" There was a fairly elegant definition proposed that required single and continous exposure through a lens. Seemed pretty ironclad... but these photos would qualify. Another ineffectual parsing bites the developer.

-------

Fred,

Yeah, unlike copyrights, trademarks have to be defended or you lose them. That's what happened to Kleenex and Aspirin, and it's why Xerox attorneys sent out innumerable polite letters for publication to magazines that wrote about "xeroxing" a paper.

If Adobe doesn't do this, they risk having anyone be able to manufacture a program called "photoshop."

It's part of the price of success; you can become too much of a household name!

pax / Ctein

[Dave]

I would say that these images are exactly what the camera sees in the same way that long star-trail images are exactly what the camera sees or a 1/2 second exposure of a waterfall is exactly what the camera sees. There is a tendency to think of photographs as moments in time...these images play with the definition of "moment" in interesting ways.

[yischon]

Zbigniew Rybczynski achieved this surreal type of imagery in moving pictures with his experimental film The Fourth Dimension http://www.zbigvision.com/The4Dim.html . He has doors peeling open, mirrors spiraling around people, and people literally entwining with each other as a double helix.

He divided each frame into 480 horizontal strips, then delayed each strip by one frame when optically printing them onto a master. (The technique can now be easily achieved in Adobe After Effects.)

You can see sample still frames if you follow the link above.

The film is available on the "Steps" DVD on his production company's web site but the picture quality is VHS quality and I wouldn't recommend it except for the super curious. The picture quality is better on the 1993 laserdisc release from Voyager Company.