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Train ride
Lockdown drives us crazy. Official measures increasingly breathe the spirit of decay. The Age of Enlightenment is over. It is no longer a reasonable reflection that counts or thoughts, that are discussed. Politics behaves more like a war management. The first victim of a war is the truth. That’s more and more disturbing.
This morning I stepped over an enigma. A structure in the roof of our Main Station in Heidelberg. As an image, there are many ways this structure could be thought of: a top-down bowl, a flying saucer – or a light dome. As it was still dark about 6 o’clock the windows appeared in a dark blue, like the adjacent ceiling.
Other perspectives show a content that could be seen as a china plate. I couldn’t stop to photograph this dome.
Longtime exposures made from a train window have a look and feel of their own. Perspective loses its sense. A moment loses its meaning. But these images are inspiring.
How to photograph the feeling of eternity ? Can there really be a feeling of eternity or are we subjected to a deception when we perceive it ? Does time fusion help although a finite process ? The following image was captured with the Slow Shutter app on my cell phone with 8 seconds.
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Time fusion
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FAQ: Time fusion
Time fusion is something I couldn’t find elsewhere. Basically it is a longtime exposure. Nothing new so far. Why making a point ?
Longtime exposures fascinate me. There are famous ones of extreme long exposure times, say one year. The camera is always at the same location. What happens with a moving camera while doing a longtime exposure ? Motion blur !
A photographer typically uses a shake or a rotation of his camera while holding it in his hands or e.g. mounted on a tripod with full flexible ball head. Postproduction uses a single shot or a combination of blurred and non-blurred images to get a result.
Here is the new idea. Sun was shining and green and yellow summer fields exerted a strong attraction to me while driving at high speed from Heidelberg to Paris using a TGV train. With my iPhone looking out of a train window I started to experiment with the Slow Shutter App. The motion blur gets a horizontal orientation with some landscape in the background of an image. The foreground is completely blurred. Some light reflections of the train window are always added. No rotational or shaky effect occurs.
Thus, a feeling of speed is transferred from the image to the viewer. See more in Discover or Flickr.
Flying into Paris by train © Julian Köpke Compare this method to a single shot motion blur during the sunset at Sylt island or to the yellow trees in the High Sierra, CA. The foreground has to be more marked, the background tends to be more blurred.
Sky and North Sea © Julian Köpke 
Lake and yellow trees © Julian Köpke -
Flying into Paris by train
I love to look out of a train window. So many photo opportunities passing by – and no chance to capture one of them.
With my iPhone App „Slow Shutter“ on our way to Bretagne via Paris sitting in a TGV (train a grande vitesse) going at 300 km/h I shot this series of images. The GPS tags are approaching Paris clearly. The result is a motion blur image dominated by horizontal lines.
Oh: above 300 km/h the internet connectivity decreases its speed. What irony !
