
A photographer captures the paths that birds make across the sky - sndean
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/01/photo-journal-birds-paths-migration-starling/
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GrantS
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](https://youtu.be/df_Pr4jAu78)

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GuiA
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.

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averagewall
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.

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GuiA
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.

~~~
chrisparton1991
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.

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gmiller123456
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.

