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The next “Sunday Project” series will be stacking.  This has been something I’ve been toying around with for a little over a year now without realizing what it was that I was doing.

 

In fact, said photo was the second of this version of my website.  The URL still reads “portfolio-test-2”.  Apparently I am due for a year in review, or something of that sort, but I digress.  I’ve mentioned somewhere that I came into stacking from a tangential angle.  Since I can’t find where I stated this, I’ll say it all again.

 

I knew of the term stacking as something you did in astrophotography.  Since I was not, and still not for the most part, into that sub-field I did not investigate the term more.  I considered the above photo “averaging”.  While I may have seen some photos using that technique previously they were rare enough that they never stuck.  In hindsight, I believe I saw something like this back around 2003-2007 that would qualify.

 

Instead I saw the technique used at “Square Root of Minus Garfield”.  David McLeish averaged all of the three panel Garfield strips from 2007 and 1978 to see what would emerge.

 

Not knowing the term “stacking” was what I was attempting, I ended up having a heck of a time figuring out how to replicate the result.  Eventually I found a formula through opacity.  It was something along the lines of “[1/(current layer -1)]+something I forget”.

 

My original attempt using existing shots of my sister did not go well.  So I backed off and went for a simpler target.  I got in my car, tethered my Canon 50D to my laptop with a time lapse of thirty seconds, and proceeded on a three hour drive to see what would emerge.  Plus with these early tests my camera was not stable.  So each photo needed to be re-aligned.  I found 17 layers gave an interesting result.  Not long after, roughly three months, I saw the same technique being used in the way I failed to originally with portraits.

 

Lately, I decided to give it some more thought with some additional knowledge of the technique.  WEYG was one of my first images using the improved methodology.  As such, I’ll be doing more stacking techniques for this project.  Heads up, this will be more of a study than a series of finished projects, though.