Q&A WITH SAM O'HARE

By MOTHERBOARD

You may have already lost your socks to Sam O’Hare’s short paean to New York, The Sandpit. It’s inspired by lyrical films like Koyaanisqatsi and time-lapse tilt shift photography, the meticulous technique that can make bulldozers look like Matchbox cars. Though the video isn’t true tilt-shift, O’Hare managed to get the impressive effect of a miniature New York in post-production using not video but thousands of continuously shot stills. Think of it as an exercise in visual Auto Tune.

How did you shoot The Sandpit?

SAM O’HARE: It is shot on a Nikon D3 (and one shot on a D80), as a series of stills. I used my Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 and Sigma 50-150mm f/2.8 lenses for all of these shots. Most were shot at 4fps in DX crop mode, which is the fastest the D3 could continuously write out to the memory card. The boats had slower frame rates, and the night shots used exposures up to two seconds each. The camera actually has an automatic cut off after 130 shots, so for longer shots I counted each click and quickly released and re-pressed the shutter release after 130 to keep shooting.

Read the rest and watch The Sandpit on Motherboard.

By MOTHERBOARD 1 year ago

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