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I recently came upon the image below, and more like them on Stephen Wilke's website, and was wondering how the image was made.
It really seems that there would be some form of post processing, but by the seemless flow of the image, it looks like the edits may have been very complex. Is there a simple way to recreate this style?
In your question I recognise two parts:
Take one photo of the daytime situation, take one photo of the evening situation. Use a tripod for the photos and let it stay there between the shots so the composition stays the same. Another possibility is to tether your camera to a laptop and use the daytime image as an overlay during the night-time shoot. This enables you to replicate the composition as well.
By placing the two photos over each other and masking one part of the night photo revealing the day photo (or the other way around) will give you the basic image. From here you need to fine-tune your mask such that the night image flows over into the day image. Gradient masks might help.
Other remarks
The use of a tripod also enables you to shoot with a long shutter time. This is needed such that the cars show a blur, which implies motion. A wide angle lens is needed to capture the whole scene in one go.
I would also consider the composition. In the example there is a very sharp edge close to the middle, making it an obvious switching point from day to night photo. This will help when blending the two images. Finding a good motive and composition might be more important here than for other subjects.
It might also be a good idea to take several photos with different exposures, to easier find matching exposures in post processing. And of course use RAW to make it easier to adjust exposure, white balance and more in post.
Since you took the photo on the exact same spot, it will be seamless. Alternatively, you could take two photos and stitch them together too.
Blending two, or more, photos seems the obvious way to do this.
This could be done by applying variable density gradient masks to two images or much more simply by masking or pasting in selected areas of one image into another and then using an edge blending effect of choice.
Note that in this photos and in all the examples on his page there is either a natural dividing line OR an area of demarcation where quite rapid change occurs.
In the example photo that you provided note that there is some well defined intrusion of one scene into the other's 'space' in some locations.
eg whereas down the building edge the boundary is well enough defined, down on the roaD in the middle the car headligt traces cross the centre line without any 'grading' or reduction in brightness. See crop below -
Note: This extract used in accordance with "fair use" policy as recognised by US and international Copyright law. This note added due to deletion of my prior work due to misunderstanding of "fair-use" by person concerned.
