Time Lapse Photography

With time lapse photography, you can watch a flower go from a bud right into full bloom. With time lapse photography, you can watch a whole building rise up from the ground, girder by girder 'til it touches the sky. With time lapse photography, you can watch the life of a city for a whole day and night in just a moment. Time lapse photography is a truly amazing thing.

Time lapse photography can be as simple as you snapping a photo every day of your houseplant as it comes into bloom over the course of weeks and then running the photos back to back. Or time lapse photography can be as complex as a computer programmed digital camera taking a picture every minute of something and then running it all together as one movie.

Before digital technology, time lapse photography was possible only on movie film where a single frame of something was shot at longer than normal increments and then shown back at normal speed. This was only possible with film, but now with digital photography and computers, time lapse photography can be done with a still camera and then downloaded and replayed on computer.

The early uses of time lapse photography taught people a lot of things they didn't know about plants and animals. Time lapse photography enabled people to view processes that they had never been able to witness before. Time lapse photography is very instructional and also fun to watch. Time lapse photography can also be done with a still camera where the shutter speed is extremely slow and the film is allowed to be exposed over a long period of time. The resulting picture can capture a lot of movement in one picture. This is done under low light conditions and/or with an extremely small aperture setting, or both.

With the use of extremely long shutter openings in still photography, the motion of the moon at night, for example, will appear streaking across the sky. This is a still camera form of time lapse photography and it is the opposite of using a very fast shutter speed to capture an object in motion and effectively freezes the image so it can be viewed as a still moment in time. When applying time lapse photography techniques to moving figures like athletes, parts of their moving body will repeat themselves in the photo and it gives an artistic touch to an otherwise straightforward snapshot. There are many useful and creative applications of time lapse photography.

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