July 12, 2010
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Lapse in judgment.
My first real attempt at time lapse photography. On a Friday at around 6:30 PM, I plopped down on the island with the traffic light on the corner of Westheimer and Post Oak Blvd. I set up my camera to take a shot every 4 seconds, mounted it on the tripod, and it let it fire away. I brought a small mat and sat down cross-legged and read Predictably Irrational for 2 hours.
I figured someone would recognize me as it’s a pretty busy intersection and about half an hour into the shoot, my friend Jane drove by yelling at me out the passenger side. A lady rolled down her car window at a red light and asked what I was shooting. The buses passed by regularly, throwing dust and debris from the side of the road into my eyes. A cyclist asked me what I was shooting with as he waited for the light to change. An older man stopped to chat with me, showing me the camera he had just gotten from Amazon that very day and how he wanted to check his new super zoom out around the area.
As the sun set, I tried to adjust the settings to compensate for the approaching darkness- I think it only works if you’re taking a picture every few minutes, not every 4 seconds.
I got home and merged all the photos into this video- it’s your standard time lapse. It’s not bad, but my technique could still use some work with the sunset and all. If I were feeling more ambitious, I may just sit out at the park near downtown one day and time lapse the sunset over downtown Houston.
Time Lapse Galleria from Andrew Nguyen on Vimeo.
