A photographer captures the paths that birds make across the sky | Hacker News Reader

A photographer captures the paths that birds make across the sky

nationalgeographic.com

72 pointssndean6 comments

Beautiful -- several years ago, I created an iOS app that does this live on screen in real time (via CoreImage filters, saving a video of the trails building up) but then never released it. I should probably just put it out there -- it was all ready to go except for a name if I recall, made a video set to music and everything. Will see if I can dig up the video...

Edit: 45 second video here for anyone interested: https://youtu.be/df_Pr4jAu78

In general, there’s more to gain by putting something out there than not, even if you think it’s unfinished/no one will care/etc. I’ve published things in the past that I thought were utter crap. Most of them never got any response; but a few unexpectedly got some users/readers a few months or years later, seemingly out of nowhere.

It’s always nice when you get an email about a side project you totally forgot, from a teacher who used your software for some need you could never have predicted, or a student who used your work for their senior thesis because it weirdly overlapped.

Manually overlaying all the frames seems tedious. I wonder if it somehow helps make the edges and background more natural. I once made a simple motion detecting video recorder with OpenCV which generated the same type of images automatically. Overlaying only the moving objects on the static background.

Artists will often do things by hand that take them countless hours. Occasionally, a programmer will see that and exclaim “I could write a script to do that in an afternoon!”

I have been both on the programmer side and the artist side.

While the programmer is right, they often tend to overlook a few things:

- a lot of artists don’t know how to program/use complex technology to automate things, but they want to make things so they just grit their teeth and do the shit work. It’s pretty humbling to see an artist spend thousands of hours doing something code could have done in 5 minutes, or come up with completely new ways to do things without the help of code/computers. I used to hang out around RISD students a fair amount, and many of those kids are more creative and resourceful than the stereotypical “hackers” (if I had to find promising startup founders, I’d place bets on RISD students over Harvard students any time)

- doing things by hand lets you understand what you’re working with in a deep, intimate way, which often benefits the work. In this example, I’m sure the photographer developed a second sense for what photos to keep, which ones to discard, what factors led to a more interesting final result. If you were to write a program to automate all that, when you want to tweak the end result you’d have to spend hours tweaking various parameters of your software, writing edge case code, etc. This can be as time consuming as making the art itself, albeit more frustrating and with less sense of control

- doing things by hand lets you stumble upon “happy little accidents”, which can dramatically improve your work for the better which would not happen if you wrote the code first and then made the art with it

All that said, the way to go is to be educated enough to be dangerous in both technical and artistic skills, as that really lets you play with your process and automate the really tedious parts.

Well said. Regardless of what side you're on, the journey is a reward in itself. The process of learning while creating is immensely satisfying, even if nobody sees the end result.

Cool. I've seen similar stuff done with bugs. Just set up a bright light on a warm night and leave the shutter open. The bugs leave trails against the black sky as they swarm around the light.

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