Empty LA
 

Ever wonder what LA would look like without the people and the cars? Check out Empty LA

I'm guessing that many of the pics have to be Photoshopped (which is fine) as many of those freeways are never completely empty.

Cool stuff

Yes, they are ALL digitally manipulated images. That's the idea.

Hey! He's using blurb.com for his book, just like me!

Cool photos, but some of my favorite people are in LA and I'd hate to have it completely devoid of life and friends. :)

While that seems obvious, I didn't see that specifically mentioned anywhere.I just assumed you guys were good friends because of this ;)

Although there have been a couple of occasions where I was on the road at odd hours (say 5:00 a.m. on a Sunday) where there WEREN'T any other cars on the road, even if only briefly. That IS weird!

I remember once, in my stupid youth (which should end any day now), where I actually did pull off the side of the I-5 freeway in Burbank and was able to sit down in the middle of the freeway (for about a nano-second) because there were no other cars around.

Why? Because I could.




ETA about the original post. It is interesting that every time I come into this thread, there is a different picture in the OP.

I've in the past tackled a similar project of compositing dozens of photos to be able to remove all the people without having to create what was behind the people.

But I didn't really have patience.

Is that what he's doing or is he more directly digitally manipulating the photos.

Though in LA with all the movie shoots and whatnot, I bet it would be possible to get a lot of interesting peopleless shots if you were aware of the opportunities.

I'd guess it's more compositing than removing, though probably some of both.

The site won't let you link directly to a photo, it's a "rotator", so you always see a different image.

If you have a very fast camera taking rapid fire photos, the compositing would actually be pretty easy, just tedious as hell (especially the freeways, wow). I find it telling that nearly all of the photos seem have been taken on overcast days, which rids the image of annoying shadows. There's one with blue sky but late in the day so the freeway part is mostly shadowed anyway. Smart and nicely done.

Actually, the new CS5 Photoshop has a nifty new Content Aware Compositing feature which now makes this a breeze.

what intrigues me is that I still sense the motion of the freeways like they are full of cars moving too fast to be seen.

This reminds me of a recent time-lapse film I saw, called "Running on Empty." Definitely worth a look!

http://rossching.com/running-on-empty/