Photography and videography can be for me a way to look deeper into what I have in some sense already seen. At the same time, with a good photograph, I can see what I didn't see the first time.

Recently I took a photograph of the street scene along Grant Avenue in San Francisco at the corner in front of the Triton Hotel and Cafe Presse. It's a bit like a Breugel painting in that you see a couple being tourists gazing at the patrons in the cafe. Then your eyes are drawn to a foursome striding accross Grant street together, eager looks on their mature faces.

Behind them a couple is standing close together on the sidewalk, and she is looking intensely into his taller eyes, and just behind them, in the window of the cafe, sits a woman holding herself as she gazes out at us. Just to the right, a number of passers by look intently up Grant Street through the gate into China Town.

The photo started as a quick shot, and I was attracted by the juxtaposition of the Yellow and Blue from the Hotel Triton Sign along with the deep reds of the Cafe Presse framing the many human characters swarming around the intersection.

Once I put the image into photoshop, I looked to see where to crop, and learned that it was precisely the exploration of the rich image that rewards the viewer. Taking the image into After Effects allowed me to implement this vision in a limited fashion.

I used motion graphics to take the incredibly detailed image made with the Nikon D300 and the 18-200mm vr Nikkor lens and explore it with the virtual camera. I made a quicktime movie that is available at this URL:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aKDhzOW5NA
At the same intersection, I also saw a man taking a photo while holding up a drawing in one hand that would appear in his picture as in front of the Chinatown gate. He was doing what an AT&T Cellphone commercial showed a father doing to send reports of his travel back home to his daughter. You can see the original commercial and my photos here at this URL:

http://www.geocities.com/bbamboo/FatherTakingPicturesForAChild.html

This web page combines the use of Google Maps to show what the father saw as he took the picture, and Google Earth where you can see both where he stood and where I stood to take the picture. This amazing technology allows us to learn more about our photos "after the fact". With Google Maps, you can see the street scene in a static sense using their photos of the building fronts. I used it to confirm my location by comparing the background in the photo of the dad taking the picture, and also to confirm my point of view. Amazing.

In another case, I took a landscape photo of what looked like a ring of trees, sent the photo to my mother who asked about the tree ring. I went to Google Earth and "flew" to where I took the photo, stood on the virtual road turnout, and pointed at the scene in my photo.

I discovered that the feature that I'd photographed was in fact a spiral planting of evergreens planted ajacent to a new vinyard near Petaluma. Again, without the ability to "fly" above the landscape and to examine more closely the subject of my photo, I would never have known that what appeared to me as a ring of trees was actually a deliberately planted spiral line of trees!


There are other times when I will use a video editor to look at video in the same manner, exploring the details of an interaction, playing it over with different temporal and/or spatial zoom, sometimes looping it to see the evolution of an encounter.

This is a way of viewing video that is deeper than the vicarious mode we're usually in when television is entertainment.

There is more to video, and it's only available when one can interactively explore a bit of video with your hands on the controls of a powerful non-linear video editing system. Time warping is a great tool for exploriing human interactions.

It's image editing as exploration, analysis and learning.