Photographs with subtle motion

I feel irritated by this artificial contrast of stationary and moving image parts.
 
Personally, I don't like it so much. I saw an article on the NY times websites that featured embedded video clips that played automatically which were shot in the visual style of a photograph, and those were much nicer to look at then these .gifs in my opinion. These are a little disconcerting, except for the less people oriented images like the barbershop and the trainstation, but those can be achieved with simple stop-motion so the "cinemagraph" technique doesn't raise my sails.

I'll try find the NY times article and link it here

EDIT: Here's the NY times article, I know it's straight video and all, but it does a much better job of moving illustration that these .gifs.
 
It is weird. Some of it works like the flickering projector, because you can imagine everything else in the scene being still or darn close to it. However most fail. Take the bicycle scene. Vegetation on the left side is of a type that should easily move in a breeze yet it doesn't move like the leaves at the bottom of the bike.
 
Gotta say, it wears thin quickly.

There are a couple of apps that let you do animated gif shots with your iphone - no real reason to tart up a nice image that much IMHO
 
Pictures like Cheers, Bacon, Coke show how carefully new techniques have to be used - they look plain fake. Process never ends, it's like ad promising one eternal life or love or health. Educated customers expect perfect product and pictures may well fit their mind schemes. Normal people realize everything is finite and don't expect something lasts forever.
 
First one looks like quasi-porn ad or find chinese/russian/whatever bride type banner ads.

The one with the hairspray is kind of cool looking but the rest not so much.
 
I'm not a fan of the look iether. It reminds of the newspaper images and photographs from scenes in the Harry Potter films !
 
Interesting effect. I can see some website ads using this, if done judiciously.

Personally, as someone said above, "it's too in between." I do love stop motion movies, but this effect feels very "forced". Good for some advertisements.
 
It's an interesting concept but in this case the execution leaves something to be desired.

The technique is not without precedent either as in the past there have been quite a few attempts to explore the boundaries of photography, stillness/movement and that grey area before it turns into a filmic event. Muybridge and Murray come to mind, though perhaps the most relevant and succesful application is to be found in Marker's 'photo-roman' La Jetée (the brief moment when the girl flutters her eyelids). From the side of cinema, the converse was done by Warhol when he experimented by taking away narrative and motion from film e.g. in Sleep and Screen Tests.

On a personal, related note, I was visiting a friend in LA many years ago, and we went into this bar for a drink, apparently a hip place, if a tad odd too, with big photos on the walls. As time went by I suddenly started feeling somewhat uneasy, though I didn't know why. After some time I looked at the photos and realised there was the faintest motion in them, not terribly unlike the images linked in this thread. For a split second I was completely stunned -- a category shortcircuit in the brain no doubt. I can't remember the bar's name, I have to ask my friend some time.

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