What is Time-lapse Photography? 

 If you are like me you probably stumbled upon an incredible work of time-lapse and just couldn’t get the images and feelings out of your head.  Possibly you are fascinated by nature and the slow changes that occur over a period of time.   A flower blooming, a sunset or a moonrise. 

 Maybe it was a construction project or a cityscape at night, full of activity and production.  Either way it was the capture of change in a way that we don’t normally see that makes time-lapse what it is.   So, let’s ask the question.

 

 

1. Is a technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured (the frame rate) is much lower than that used to view the sequence. When played at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing.

 

 

2. Time-lapse photography is a cinematography technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured (aka the frame rate) is much lower that that which will be used to play the sequence back.  When you replay this sequence at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and lapsing.
Put simply: We are manipulating time. Objects and events that would normally take minutes, days, hours, or months can be viewed to completion in seconds having been speeded up by factors of tens to millions.

Where did time-lapse photography originate?

 

Eadweard Muybridge (yes the spelling is correct, see below), a nineteenth-century photographer is often quoted as originating the technique. Cathy Curtis point out that he is famous for three things:

• his own bizarre spelling of his name
• his sensational acquittal for the murder of his wife’s lover
• [tooltip text=”Legend has it he was hired help the Governor win a bet for $25,000. When Occident streaked across a specially prepared track, the horse successively tripped wires attached to 24 still cameras, 21 inches apart. The Governor was wrong and lost.”] and his blurry but indisputable photographic proof that Occident, former California Gov. Leland Stanford’s racehorse, galloped by lifting all four feet off the ground.

 Probably the most important person to popularize the art wasn’t a photographer at all, at least not at first. In the evenings, after work as a banker John Ott would come home and build and experiment with time-lapse equipment and the growth of plants.