This bit from the film Spectre of Hope has been on my mind recently:
This notion of capturing the world in what is cumulatively a very small amount of time is interesting to me, and I realized that, given that all of my digital photos record the exposure for each frame, I could calculate exactly how much actual time I have recorded. I wrote a script (details on that after the jump) to do just this for all the photos I've taken since I got my first camera in 2002, and the total exposure time for 27611 images is 2360.473 seconds, or a bit under 40 minutes. That I take the occasional long exposures inflates this figure to a certain extent, but even with that it's a small amount of time for something that feels a lot longer.
By the way - Spectre of Hope is currently available in its entirety on YouTube in 5 parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.
Script Details
I used Ruby for this. For jpg images, it's easy using the exifr library:
Dir.glob(photo_dir + "/**/*.jpg") do |img|
begin
exposure = EXIFR::JPEG.new(img).exposure_time;
rescue
puts "Problem reading exif from file " + img
next
end
if (exposure)
total_exposure += exposure
end
end
However, once I started using RAW for all my pictures, it became more complicated, as the exifr library supports jpeg and tiff files only. I ended up parsing the Lightroom metadata files instead:
Dir.glob(photo_dir + "/**/*.xmp") do |img|
doc = XML::Document.file(img);
exposure = doc.find("//exif:ExposureTime", 'exif:http://ns.adobe.com/exif/1.0/').first.content
exp = exposure.split('/')
num = Rational(Integer(exp[0]), Integer(exp[1]))
total_exposure += num
end
This took me a while to develop, as the XMP format is RDF, and I could not make REXML play nicely with it. LibXML did the job with no problems.
Bill, that clip has some tremendous photography in it. Wow! Thank you for sharing it :)
As a Oral Storyteller I was interested in the aspect of time in getting the listeners mind to where the story is to be but I never looked at time frames of a picture like that and am interested in seeing if I can relate the ssame idea into a story.
Thank for the imput.