I captured my friend transiting the sun during a skydive | Hacker News Reader

I captured my friend transiting the sun during a skydive

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46 pointsbpierre13 comments

https://nitter.net/AJamesMcCarthy/status/1989027887689998561...

So.. it's a composite and .. "transiting" isn't quite accurate either. hmmm :-(

>The sun in the background was sharpened via a stacked image but the image is 100% real and authentically captured in camera (see the video in the OP reply for real time view). Not a composite!

He just kept shooting the sun after the jumper cleared, and stacked up those shots. I think saying it's a 'composite' devalues the image and just makes it seem like he cut out the jumper and pasted on to the sun.

It does devalue the image indeed. He didn't cut out the jumper and paste it onto the sun but he did take images of the sun and paste them onto the jumper, using the jumper as a mask. Which seems to me like a distinction without a difference.

If his images were real they would have shown the powered paraglider too. The images are a composite of photos that he took of the sun and a frame from the video that he took of the jumper.

Is it pretty? Certainly! It's art! But it's 'photography' the same way the 'So Yummy' YouTube channel is cooking.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6abePkXncCM

Frame stacking and compositing is so common in astrophotography that it would be more unusual if he didn't composite additional frames. Would you say the same thing about HDR bracketing? This is a very weird take.

This is like saying long exposures don't count because they're composite images

I disagree.

All photos have an exposure time; that's an inherent property of them (think film). Compositing images digitally on top one another is not an inherent property of photos.

You can double expose film, and I think that's a finer line, but I think the distinction most people care about is really analog vs digital.

That doesn't make any sense. Did you mean double exposures?

Isn't a long exposure one where you leave the aperture open for a long time, but it still constitutes as a single take?

Yes

Even multiple exposures of one frame of film is, as far as I can tell, still generally considered one photograph.

Love it. The concept and the execution. Just bought one for my new place.

What an achievement.

Incredible.

https://nitter.net/AJamesMcCarthy/status/1989027887689998561...

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