Experiments at ivanwlam.com

First official post in the Time-Lapse section. Lots of experimenting with a guarantee of better outcome in the future.

Combined with the first Photomerge post, this unfortunately tells you how much time I spent in my room back in college. I must clarify, though, that I did go out and socialize from time to time.

I took pictures of my view from relatively the same spot for two years without any real goal. I thought it would be cool to do something with the photos someday, but I didn’t know what. Well, here it is, and boy, am I disappointed.

Here are the problems that I’ve encountered and realized:

• The photos are taken…
  • in different weather conditions
  • at different times of day
  • at not consistent enough positions
  • with two cameras in three different sizes
• Since some photos have leaves while others don’t, it was impossible to have Photoshop do the dirty job of aligning the photographs for me. So I had to align each photo based on the building in the background, then match the position one by one.
• Because I didn’t take the photos on a regular basis, the progression of the tree’s state look very abrupt.
• The exporting of the video took so long (two hours) I thought Photoshop froze, so I closed the program and tried again under different export settings.

As I mentioned, the periods between any two sequential photos vary from a day to almost a month. That is why you see some photos longer than the others. The timeline plays to scale, where one frame (1/30 sec) is a day. I used Photoshop CS3′s animation panel to set up my timeline.

The time period of the entire collection, from the first time I randomly took a photo of my view (October 05), to the last before I moved out (August 07), was 663 days, which converts to under 23 seconds. I rounded up the time so you can see the final photo before the video ends.

I believe I have one or three more time-lapse collections from the past (and present) that I have yet to put together. But I can almost guarantee that any of them will be better than this one.