The Gif that Keeps on Giving

The planetarium at the St. Louis Science Center is a 50-year old structure that is uniquely shaped and has a stark white surface. This year they have been coloring that surface with LED light after dark. I wanted to capture the curves and the color of the planetarium so I spent three evenings last week scouting locations to shoot from and taking pictures. It was a very cold week and I was on my bicycle. 

So why did it take me three days? Most of my pictures were taken from a distance in an attempt to include light from nearby traffic. None of these photos turned out the way I wanted though. This building looks more alien than graceful when paired with it's more pedestrian surroundings. The solution was to simplify my approach and take a photo from the front drive. The entrance lends the building a visual base, and lets you know you are looking at a habitable structure and not a cinched nuclear cooling tower.  

Since the color of the building changes over time I wanted a way to represent that without repeating the same photograph a dozen times. I decided this was a good excuse to learn how to create a gif file in Photoshop. Gifs, of course, have existed since the early days of the internet and understandably have a reputation of being obnoxious. They have enjoyed a bit of a renaissance over the past couple of years though and can be used  to great, or at least interesting, effect in the right hands. 

For as old as this file type is I was surprised by how much computing power it requires to create one. I crashed Photoshop several times creating the above gif before decreasing the resolution of the photos. These files also use a limited number of colors, so my images did get noticeably mangled in the processing. Because of this, I included one high resolution photo below.