If you need the reference…
Last weekend, I went on a photo walk in Baltimore with friend/colleague Bill Shrewbridge, and we went to check out something of a Baltimore unique thing- the Patterson Bowling Alley on Eastern Avenue, a mighty emporium of 6 lanes. Built in 1927, it is one of the hubs of a variety of bowling (and many say it originated here) popular in baltimore and a few other east coast cities, duckpins. The pins are much smaller than ten pin, and the ball about the size of a grapefruit, so its harder to make a mark (the top scores in the alley were like 212).
I remember doing this as a kid, and of course we had to have a go at at (the scores are not presented to preserve our vanity).
We had the stylish shoes going…
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
I played around with doing some animated GIFs- here is one from a series of photos shot in rapid mode with my 7D and stitched in Photoshop, this is the kind of repetitive, infinite motion variety (there is some annoying flickering from light changes on the far wall):
And here is the other one done on the iPhone with Cinemagram, with the reverse motion a bit more unworldly, like the ball bounces back off the pins
This of course may not have any storytelling meaning, per se, as just media.
But the way I think about these is they could be seeds for story or something to wrap a story around.
Even with that, there is still something interesting and relevant about reducing a scene to its very basics of movement.
That is the the Zen of Animated GIFs, the fluidity of life reduced to 3, 4, 5 frames of motion.
