Time-Lapse Photography - Frame-by-Frame Stop Motion: The Guide to Non-Traditional Animation Techniques - page 52

camera and shooting frames at an even and given rate allows viewers to see
events sped up in time. It is the complement to slow-motion photography,
and it reveals the movement in the world around us in a way that we could
never experience from normal observation. Ott's early experiments showed
the blossoming of flowers, and Fricke's work captured the flow of clouds like
turbulent water and the flow of human urban movement like blood pulsing
in our veins.
Time is often considered the fourth dimension, and time-lapse filming
steps into this arena. This kind of stop motion allows us to observe nature
in the forms and textures that we understand as natural, since we are
using photographic images, but it delivers the added dimension of an
expanded view of time. As a result of these properties, scientists have
turned to time-lapse photography to help understand our universe and
our place in it. Astronomers observe the skies and stars at night using
time-lapse sequences. It allows them to see the patterns of movement
and development around us. When John Ott started using time-lapse
photography, he became fixated on the blossoming of flowers. This
observation led him to become an expert on the effects of light, and he
used that information to improve our lives through a better understanding
of ultraviolet and infrared rays.
In San Francisco, an experiment is taking place on the roof of the
Exploratorium. Ken Murphy, an artist with a background in electronics,
mounted a stationary camera on the roof and is capturing the moving sky
above the building. His project is called A History of the Sky . He shoots one
1024 × 768 high-resolution frame on a digital camera every 10 seconds each
Fig 4.1 a sequence of time-lapse frames from Ken Murphy's A History of the Sky , © 2009.