Photographing A Town That Never Was – The Meta Picture

http://themetapicture.com/photographing-a-town-that-never-was/

by bandris • 12 years ago

218 43 12 years ago

themetapicture.com

batoure2• 12 years ago

I highly suggest going straight to his flicker feed its way better

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24796741@N05/

betadreamer• 12 years ago

The link is awesome! More photos!! I especially like the Giant Head Oversees Accident.

mxfh• 12 years ago

Thanks for the flickr page. Michael Paul Smith also has a proper Homepage: http://www.visitelginpark.com/

Was even featured in NYTimes in 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/automobiles/collectibles/1...

Also I feel quit uncomfortable about the OP linking to this, arguably not as annoying as others, meme aggregator page. Anything that categorizes this under funny, images, photos doesn't really care about the content, other than getting inbound links.

batoure2• 12 years ago

yeah the link baiting was why i went out looking for and posted the flickr page

pizza• 12 years ago

i have somewhat of a curious attraction to deceit -- this is awesome

coldcode• 12 years ago

Hollywood has been doing this forever. It's pretty well done but without any people it's strangely unsatisfying.

afreak• 12 years ago

Sort of it makes me think of a potemkin village except it is not. I think the lack of natural items in his shots minus what is in the background is what helps his images come off as inexplicably real.

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

Hollywood almost completely stopped doing this some time ago thanks to CGI. It's quite hard to find people who can do good miniature work now.

mandelbulb• 12 years ago

The occasional selfies were funny :)

keyle• 12 years ago

While most articles on HN are about the riches and the way to the riches... This man lives in a 3 rooms apartment and does magic with his hands.

That's a truly enjoyable link.

Look at his face in the selfies, he looks happier than most!

noonespecial• 12 years ago

I envy him. Not like I envy rich people where I wish I could be myself in their situation. I actually wish I could be him.

melvinmt• 12 years ago

Ah, this reminds me of Marwencol, albeit slightly less disturbing.

Crito2• 12 years ago

I am impressed that the effect holds up even after I read that the pictures were of models. Often when you learn the 'trick' to something like this the illusion vanishes, but with these pictures that doesn't seem to really happen. The road surfaces seem an bit uniform (though the odd oil slick or damp spot helps a lot) but otherwise these seem to be solidly past the uncanny valley for me.

astrieanna• 12 years ago

For that reason (roads being too smooth), the snowy ones were the most convincing to me.

MrKristopher• 12 years ago

It's like Inception - you have to look at the ground to realize it's a dream

whyenot• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, for me, I noticed that none of the cars (apparently) driving on the road had any people in them. It really sticks out to me, where are the people? I love his work, though, but it's like looking at pictures of that town near Chernobyl where all the people suddenly left, leaving all their belongings behind.

yeukhon• 12 years ago

It's amazing how before I saw the miniature models my brain (pattern recognition) skipped the full detail. Once I saw the models I started to notice how wheels were perfect, the houses started to look a little unreal. Also, filter does disguise flaws.

kimonos• 12 years ago

Wow! The photos are amazing! Two thumbs up!

devsatish• 12 years ago

Awesome. I want to take a stroll in that town/bygone era.

pg• 12 years ago

The cars are too clean. The pictures would look even more realistic if he sprayed them with dust.

bane• 12 years ago

and where the sidewalk meets the road surface isn't quite right.

Crito2• 12 years ago

The way I see it is that he has convincingly portrayed staged photographs of real show cars. In other words it looks like somebody took some nice cars and cleaned them up really nice to be photographed.

Weathering definitely is a great way to add to the realism though. Adam Savage (mythbusters guy) has some great videos on Tested of using various weathering techniques to make props look incredibly convincing: http://www.tested.com/art/makers/453823-one-day-builds-adam-...

vacri• 12 years ago

The cars are too empty. Making people is hard, but you only need to make a portion of them to be visible behind a car window, and it would really enhance the effect. No more ghost-driven cars in the middle of the road. The dreamlike quality for me is the lack of life; the sterility.

Fantastic photos though, and they do really work when it's reasonable to see no humans in shot.

Theodores• 12 years ago

These pictures are fantastic as far as accomplishment is concerned, it seems that in models it is the same as 3D in that it is the lighting that makes things 'real'. That is not to overlook the model making it is just that lighting, including shadows, is what matters rather than detail to make a scene convincing.

I like people in a scene and I would like to see what could be done in this aspect, to 'comp' people dressed in period attire on the streets and behind those windscreens. As soon as you have people you have a story rather than a mere scene. Lighting matters again and one could take three pictures - the full picture with foreground set, picture minus the foreground set, picture minus foreground set and pedestrians. Pop the layers into Photoshop and, a few layer mask edits later a full scene with people in it.

I must say that a million plus likes on Facebook is extremely impressive.

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

Matching the angles and lighting is extremely time-consuming, unfortunately. It's doable of course, but very difficult and I get the impression that this gentleman's goal is not to spend more time in front of the computer, otherwise he could achieve the same results with ray tracing and various image composition tools.

callmeed• 12 years ago

Conversely you can make a real scene look miniature by using a tilt-shift lens (I used to use the Canon 45mm). Vincent Laforet's are some of my favorites: http://agonistica.com/tilt-shift-photography-by-vincent-lafo...

(I think what Michael Paul Smith does is much more impressive)

devb3• 12 years ago

It's funny that current TS/PC lenses cost upwards of $2000, but Michael Paul Smith stated that he has to use a cheap Canon Powershot because the cheap lens obscures the details enough to make them believable and the tiny aperture keeps the "real" background enough in focus to keep the scale believable.

shotwell• 12 years ago

A $2000 tilt-shift or perspective control lens would be inexpensive according to some architectural, or otherwise technical, photographers.

Houshalter• 12 years ago

This video is pretty cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk9EBOOAYiU

D9u• 12 years ago

To me the images are reminiscent of old Godzilla movies, etc...

WildUtah• 12 years ago

Beautiful pictures. They're even more impressive once you see the illusion. Even the fake greenery and curb and gutter seams are still hard to pick out even when you know they're there. And the lighting is excellent.

But the look -- aside from car styling -- isn't a matter of charm and innocence. It's a way of life that has been outlawed in America.

The mix of residential and commercial land use is illegal in almost all American communities, especially at the scale pictured. A few big cities still permit residential over commercial but whatever is left in most of America is grandfathered. If it's taken down, you can't rebuild it. In fact, my whole neighborhood is like that; if an earthquake hit, not one 1920s American railroad suburb bungalow on my block would meet zoning to be rebuilt.

Also, almost none of those commercial establishments has parking in front and surrounding it. The minimum requirements in almost all of America is about double as much space for parking as for all building interior space. Floor area ratios and landscape buffers usually require even more space around parking lots because they're so ugly. Today, even the shots with parking wouldn't have nearly enough and almost all the commercial buildings would be illegal. I don't see any of the residential buildings with the 2-3 independent parking spots usually required, either. Most of them -- for the sake of charm -- don't have any off street parking. Also, driveways usually can't abut the property line, so the garage has to dominate the front of the house, creating a snout house effect and eliminating the friendly front porches.

Part of the appeal of these scenes is evoking an America that has been outlawed in pursuit of faster roads and free parking. The grace and community of neighborhoods, the diversity of age and social class, and affordability have been part of the cost. Certainly this is not the first time reversing those mistakes has made a scene prettier. [0]

[0]http://www.humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes...

devb3• 12 years ago

You would really like Geography of Nowhere by James Kunstler, if you haven't read it already.

http://kunstler.com/books/the-geography-of-nowhere/

Many small cities (including Jersey City, my home) will not allow commercial businesses to be built without residential above it, at least in downtown commercial districts.

wtvanhest• 12 years ago

There has been a revival of mixed use communities in America. Just google 'mixed use developments'.

Its different, but at least towns and developers realize that there is demand for commercial and residential mixed.

colmmacc• 12 years ago

Here in Seattle, new buildings are required to be mixed-use in many areas. But there seems to be a glut of commercial tenants for the locations. About 3 out of 5 of these buildings seem to fill up quickly with residential tenants (and rising rents!), condo owners or even offices, but with their ground-floor commercial facilities lying empty for years.

Most of these buildings have parking around and in front of them, and are in convenient areas, but they still seem to lie empty, while the big-box stores and mega-lots still persist. Even with favourable zoning, it seems like there may be other economic or selection factors at play.

I do wish the spaces could be used more creatively in the meantime, it'd be great to have some pop-up galleries for example.

nitrogen• 12 years ago

But there seems to be a glut* of commercial tenants for the locations.* [emphasis added]

Did you, perhaps, mean the opposite of "glut," maybe "shortage" or "paucity?" The subsequent sentence seems to suggest that there aren't enough commercial tenants.

SixSigma• 12 years ago

What interests me about this is the difference between the parking situation in the US and Europe. We don't have enough space for the kind of parking regulations the US requires. I know urban supermarkets that have no parking whatsoever.

And then I think of Vietnam. 92 million people, 70 million scooters. 2-300% tax on cars. The Vietnese I know have a desire to buy a car but they don't seem to think of where they will park it. Imagine if everyone here suddenly had a car :

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/85662646

jedrek• 12 years ago

What's awful about where in live in Poland is that people don't care that they don't have a place to park. They second they buy a car, they feel they are entitled to get a parking space. Illegal parking is a massive problem here and the only place I've seen it worse was in Rome.

hypertexthero• 12 years ago

Yep. Good book about this: [The Death and Life of Great American Cities](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Ame...) by Jane Jacobs

chunger• 12 years ago

Robbie the Robot even makes an appearance!

ido• 12 years ago

Very impressive photos! Although I must say that other than the old cars it just looks like a fairly boring suburb to me (not american, maybe that's part of the reason).

aryehhoffman• 12 years ago

One of the most fabulous things I've seen for a long time. Really amazing!

agumonkey• 12 years ago

When I was into 3d modeling/rendering I struggled to make anything look real. This guy could write books about lighting.

Photographing A Town That Never Was – The Meta Picture

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