What’s driving Mr Dazy?

The story we can tell within a single exposure does not have to be restricted to that period of time during which the shutter was open. If we take a picture at 4pm exactly, the story represented in that frame does not have to start at 4pm and end at 1/60sec past the hour. With care and consideration for what we include in the composition we can make our picture sum up the events of perhaps an hour or even a whole day. There’s no denying of course that it’s a tricky job to compress a few hours into a fraction of a second, and we don’t always manage it as well as we’d like.

It is easier to represent a longer period of time by showing a series of images. That way we can mix the broad view with close-up details so when exhibited together, and consumed as a single body, they can work together to form an account with more twists, turns and intricate features. A movie does this especially well – presenting us images at a rate of 24 per second that feed our imagination as we develop an idea of what is going on in the scene. With a panning camera we can also collect information about the whole environment while appreciating a sense of the time over which the sequence spans.

Operating somewhere in that area between the still