Mon 10 Mar 2008

The Beautiful Photography Of Seb Perez-Duarte

I get a lot of joy from using Flickr, both as a contributor and browser. One of my favourite streams of photos to watch comes from Flickr username Seb Przd (he a blog, too). I've never met this gentleman, but his photos are amazing. As his profile mentions, he specialises "in all kinds of images that cannot be taken with physical cameras."

Beyond his photos, Mr. Perez-Duarte takes the time and effort to explain how he constructs his images. Given that a lot of his panoramic and modified shots involve some fairly serious levels of mathematics and computer science, he's taking on a big job here. Explaining conformal mappings to most people takes more bravery than I possess!

Consider this image:

It's impressive. So how would one go about making this? Fortunately, there's a tutorial. Start here and then follow the successive images to see each step. Yes, there's some slightly scary mathematics involved if you've forgotten your complex analysis courses from university. But it's probably time for a refresher course in that area anyway.

The other thing that attracts me to these explanations is that they're all done with tools that work on Linux. His primary tools are the gimp, hugin and enblend. There's a lot more discussion of the technology behind the art at his blog site if you want to learn more. Lately, we've also been seeing some povray images — such as this one and this earlier one. Notice, again, in that latter image that there is a nice discussion of how the image was constructed.

I can spend hours browsing Seb Perez-Duarte's photos. In fact, this post has taken about half an hour longer than I expected to write because I had fun and some difficulty selecting only a couple of images to highlight. It's my kind of art.

Finally, one of Seb's relatives (judging from the surname) has similarly creative abilities (that's just one set I like, but his whole photo stream is enjoyable). I've also discovered a few weeks ago that there's a Math World group on Flickr. Awesome! Yep... I do get a lot of joy from using Flickr.

Topics: art, photography/flickr, software/open source