Night Photography - Third Monk

Sep 23, 2014Jun 17, 2016

Circle of Abstract Ritual – Psychedelic Stop Motion Time Lapse About Creation and Destruction (Video)

This short film combines 300,000 photos of riots, wildfires, and paintings in abandoned houses. The entire stop motion time lapse was created without any digital special effects.

Circle of Abstract Ritual began as an exploration of the idea that creation and destruction might be the same thing.

The destruction end of that thought began in earnest when riots broke out in my neighborhood in Anaheim, California, 2012. I immediately climbed onto my landlord’s roof without asking and began recording the unfolding events. The news agencies I contacted had no idea what to do with time lapse footage of riots, which was okay with me because I had been thinking about recontextualizing news as art for some time. After that I got the bug.

I chased down wildfires, walked down storm drains on the L.A. River and found abandoned houses where I could set up elaborate optical illusion paintings. The illusion part of the paintings are not an end in themselves in my work. They’re an intimation of things we can’t physically detect; a way to get an ever so slight edge on the unknowable.

– Jeff Frost

Dec 23, 2013Jun 17, 2016

Incredible Milky Way Timelapse Reveals Hawaii Night Sky (Video)

This beautiful timelapse video from Sean Goebel depicts the Milky Way over Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in amazing detail, complete with telescopes and dancing laser beams.

Goebel, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, created the new Hawaii night sky video from photographs shot on three consecutive nights in April and four nights in the summer of 2013.

The film features the night sky progression over Mauna Kea, a 13,803-foot (4,207 meters) mountain on Hawaii’s Big Island, and its many telescopes.

The Keck, Gemini and Subaru telescopes each have lasers, which are used to remove the blurring effects of Earth’s atmosphere using adaptive optics.

Goebel set up his cameras on nights when the weather was clear, the moon was small and when he knew the telescopes would be running the lasers. On some of the nights, astronomers were using the lasers to observe the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

> Hawaii Night Sky Revealed in Stunning New Video | SPACE

Oct 27, 2013Jun 17, 2016

Mirror City – Amazing Psychedelic Timelapse of Kaleidoscopic Cityscapes (Video)

Mirror City is a psychedelic visual story through some of the great American cities: Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. These clips were all processed from their original form, into the kaleidoscopic visuals that you see in this video.

Man-made geometric shapes are mixed with elements of color and movement to create less of a structured video, and more of a plethora of visual stimulation. The video starts off with simple mirrors and recognizable architecture, as the video progresses, so does the visual stimulation, showing the real abstraction of the piece.

When I first started Mirror City, I wanted to create a video that was completely out of the norm. I wanted to showcase something unique and artistic, which takes Timelapse photography into a more abstract direction.

Many people visit these large cities every day, and all of these places have been shot and filmed, but I wanted to emulate these urban landscapes in a way that nobody has even seen before.

I have worked on this piece for an extremely long amount of time. I have spent time mirroring images and videos for the past five years, and I have been working on this specific piece for about four months. I felt it was time to combine Timelapse photography and the simplicity of a kaleidoscope, and create Mirror City. – Michael Shainblum

Jul 4, 2013Jan 25, 2018

Mel D. Cole – Capturing Hip Hop Culture in Black & White (Photo Gallery)

NYC-based Mel D. Cole a.k.a. Village Slum shoots mostly black and white, but whatever he shoots, it’s in-your-face and awesome. His work got attention from shooting Erykah Badu and Common in 2001, and since then he’s become known as the “house photographer” for the legendary Roots Crew and has been pinpointed by Questlove as his favorite contemporary photographer.