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This is a study about the use of continuous shooting in photography, about sequences and about what I like to call subsequences.
While I was experimenting with Davide using a webcam in Webcamgrams, I’ve been tempted to bring the same concept outside the narrow environment of the video/computer short range of action. To shoot series of pictures in sequence is an easy thing, especially today that every camera has the continuous shooting mode.

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The problem, if anything, is to express something detached from reality through sequences because this kind of photos are so deep-rooted with time to naturally become a representation of a specific moment (beaten by the interval between the pictures) and a specific space (the place where the action happens which, for obvious reasons, it’s always the same for the entire sequence). I have to say that I’m still not completely pleased with the results, but I think I’m getting there.

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Something different, even if directly connected with the shooting in sequence, are the subequences. In mathematics, a subsequence is a sequence that originates from a larger sequence and it’s obtained deleting some of the original elements keeping the remaining ones in the original order. Translating it in photography, I see a subsequence as a very large series of pictures that can be modify in space but not in time. Let’s see if I can explain it better with a visual example:

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This strange jigsaw is called “The garden” and was shot at my first home here in London. I walked through the little garden that was at the back of the house with my finger on the shutter release changing the framing while I was walking and then I reconstructed in Photoshop my route placing the pictures in a sequence that pauses and moves inside a rectangular space (which was similar to the original conformation of the garden). What I was trying to obtain was a faceted representation of the space obeying to the original sequence’s order but pausing from time to time to explore a specific fragment of space. The final result is (or it should be) a comprehensive view of the garden (with an intuitable specific shape and size, deducible by the existence of a predominant perspective) and, at the same time, a subsequence of pictures showing a more personal view of the place, with specific points of interests and an inner time sequence that should give the viewer the sensation of moving in first-person inside a graphic representation of the garden.

I’ve just discovered a freeware software called Sqirlz Morph that is driving me crazy! I like to use the morph effect with series of still pictures because the animation that comes out is usually quite disturbing. I’m not talking of course of the traditional morphing effect (a human face that dissolves in a cat or, if you really hate your subject, in a pig/frog/spider etc) I’m talking about bracketing around with your camera and then putting together the photos in a kind of liquid perpetual fading that deforms every picture in a artistic (-ish) way. So I took my friend Davide’s portraits from the Webcamgrams project (yeah, he’s my favourite cavy) and I ended up with this creepy animation, which is a quite funny thing since Davide is the less creepy person I know.