New York City-based fashion photographer Jamie Beck, in collaboration with Kevin Burg, a web designer with a background in video and motion graphics, has created a series of gorgeous animated GIFs she calls “cinemagraphs”. A couple of them feature Canadian supermodel Coco Rocha, and these have gained quite a bit of media exposure recently. According to Rocha, cinemagraphs are “more than a photo, but not quite a video.”

Even though the concept of animated GIFs is as old as the Internet, the ones circling around the web are often tacky and low brow. Jamie Beck’s animated GIFs, on the other hand, have an amazing atmosphere that has elevated the art of animated GIFs.

Jamie Beck’s first few animated images were sequenced still shots looped in rapid succession which is a fairly common way of making an animated image. Then she began utilizing more fluid motion isolated in certain parts of an image to to capture a moment of time, but also to un-freeze a still photograph by showing that moment's temporal movement. Says Jamie Beck:

We feel there are many exciting applications for this type of moving image. There's movement in everything and by capturing that plus the great things about a still photograph you get to experience what a video has to offer without the time commitment a video requires.

Source: The Atlantic

More Cinemagraphs From Jamie Beck