2017’s photographic fascination has been time lapse photography. If I want to shoot every night, I need to do it close to my apartment (DFW traffic is awful). Some of the still photographic ideas in the area have become boring. There’s only so many sunset photos of 15th Street before they get old. There’s only so many compositions that I can do.
For those that do not know what a time lapse is, Merriam-Webster defines it as
time-lapse: adj. used to describe a way of filming something in which many photographs are taken over a long period of time and are shown quickly in a series so that a slow action (such as the opening of a flower bud) appears to happen quickly
Time lapse photography requires a different kind of patience and planning. With true still photography, I can show up when something looks nice, take the picture, leave, and know exactly what I am getting. A time lapse requires some patience. I now need to care about what the scene will look like twenty, thirty, forty minutes from now.
My thought process is different. Now I try and predict what the scene will look like in the future, whether it’s a sunset or sunrise, lots of vehicle traffic, or the streetlights turning on.
Last night was the Plano Art and Wine Walk, which means lots of foot traffic in Downtown Plano. Historically, I stay away from photographing people, but people make a great subject for a time lapse. I took almost 1000 single images last night, and I edited together one sequence of ~250 into the video below. I was on the 4th floor stairwell to get the perspective.
I have embarked on a larger time lapse project of Downtown Plano, and this is a single clip from this larger project.
Ben There Shot That 