Thaindian News

London, April 27 (IANS) Artists have developed ‘cinemagraphs’ that look like still photos but actually feature a subtle area of movement designed to grab your eye and keep you looking. The effect is captivating.

In one shot of a crowded square, bodies are frozen in time, but one man quietly turns the pages of his newspaper. And a picture of photographer Jamie Beck, one of the two behind the project, leaps off the screen when her hair starts to blow in a breeze.

Beck has worked with motion graphics artist Kevin Burg to make the cinemagraphs by using GIFs, a type of picture format similar to a JPEG which has been around since the invention of home computers, the Daily Mail reports.

Only now with broadband internet are they bringing it to life with a startling effect. “Our cinemagraphs are a way of adding motion to a still image,” Beck said.

In most cases, she shoots the photos and Burg adds on motion-graphics over several hours of painstaking editing. The more complex ones take an entire day to pull together.

New York-based Beck said: “There’s something magical about a still photograph — a captured moment in time — that can simultaneously exist outside the fraction of a second the shutter captures.”