Berlin Photographer Thomas Birke is creating incredible long time exposures of our world’s metropolises. Shooting analog large format 8×2 with a Sinar P2, his pictures stand out due to their enormous density and richness of detail.

I am most interested in density. My aspiration is to show at least a 1000 people or their traces on every picture. Be it the illuminated windows of their apartments, the light streaks of their vehicles or their clothes hung out of windows for drying. Even if you do not see people directly, you can see their footprint on the urban environment. An organism that is alive and breathing. One shall print the pictures in a 2×3 metre scale and be able to find another story on every square centimetre. The images should provoke interest on first sight, through colour, shape and proportions. But even if you examine them more intensively, you should never be bored.

You can view and download these and a lot more photographs in high resolution on Flickr. Mind you, if Thomas publishes his pictures with 10 megapixels on Flickr, this is under 2% of the original resolution of up to 600 megapixels which allows for 2 meter printouts at 300 dpi!

Be sure to check out Thomas’ blog where he writes about his progress as a photographer, his production process and his inspiration. Also, Thomas’ pictures along with some thoughts about his work are featured in the fourth issue of the The Velvet Cell Magazine.

The photos in this post are from Seoul (1-3), Hong Kong (4-13), New York (14-15), Berlin (16), Paris (17-19) and Tokyo (20-24).