Timelapse – Hal's Photo Blog

California Timelapse Compilation

Hal — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 23:18:19 +0000

California is the most populated state in the United States, and the third largest. It’s almost double the size of the United Kingdom and slightly larger than Japan. If it was it’s own independent country (as it was briefly for a few weeks in 1846), it would have the 8th largest economy in the world by GDP.

It contains the highest summit and the lowest desert in the Continental United States (and the second-lowest point in the world), both of which are in the same county.

It’s most known for movies, technology, wine, and national parks, but also grows more than a third of the vegetables consumed in the US, two-thirds of the fruits and nuts, and an unknown but presumably huge percentage of marijuana.

It contains every major climatological biome except tundra. More important than those facts, to me, is that I was born and spent most of my life here.

My goal was to cram all of the visually stunning things about the entire state, from coastline to mountains to deserts, from cities to wilderness and national parks, into four minutes. I intended to use as a pitch for work from the California Board of Tourism, but now I’m sharing it publicly.

The average clip took 1-3 hours to film and another 3-10 hours to edit. Several cuts are from clips more than 24 hours long. I shot 423 clips over four years to make this, but the majority of the 67 clips ultimately used were shot in the last 12 months.

The music is “Intense Rocks” by Sebastian Watzinger, licensed from Audiosocket.

Most of the individual clips are available for license via Getty Images, Dissolve, or directly. Many of them feature in the Magic Window timelapse screensaver for Mac.

Paris When it Drizzles

Hal — Tue, 02 Sep 2014 04:13:40 +0000

At the end of 2013, I’d been living with my now-wife’s family in Yorkshire, England. With my 30th birthday quickly approaching in January, she asked me what I wanted to do for the occasion. “I want to have sushi for dinner”, I had decided. I’ve done this every year on my birthday since I was a kid. With there not being very many options for Japanese food in Northern England, our plans evolved to the point where we’d decided to spend a week in Paris. I took all the camera gear the Eurostar would allow me to cram on board (the timelapse dolly kept in a ski bag, as skis travel for free), and so spent the week filming time lapses in Paris’ rainy January weather.

After a few days of carrying camera gear around in the rain, Lizzy asked me “Do you really want to spend your whole birthday trip filming stuff?” I paused, thought about this question for a second, and replied “Yes. Yes I do,” before clamping my 6D to a metal guard rail on the roof of Printemps.

And yes, we did eat sushi on my birthday.

All but a few of these clips were shot in one week in January of 2014. A small handful were shot on a previous trip to Paris in October of 2012.

Music: “Wreck Beach” by Sean Bayntun
soundcloud.com/sean-bayntun

Timelapse London

Hal — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 10:51:03 +0000

I just spent the last week at iStockalypse London learning from fellow iStock and Getty Images staff and contributors. In between seminars, lectures, and drinking, I managed to squeeze in two days of lugging two cameras and a motion control dolly through the tube to capture the patterns and pulses of human and vehicular traffic in the city.

After letting my body recover for a few days, I processed the scenes I shot, and edited together this little video. Have a look, and let me know what you think!

Tahoe Blue

Hal — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 03:30:17 +0000

A few weeks ago, Josh and I shipped Tahoe Blue, basically a Lake Tahoe version of Magic Window, which is a live desktop and screensaver for Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Android.

Our timelapse demo video has been making the rounds today (thanks LaughingSquid and San Francisco Chronicle!), and I realized I never posted it on my own blog. So here’s the video:

Editing was done by Josh, and the music is Justin Lassen.

For those who have been following this blog for awhile (basically four of you according to my web statistics. Hi mom!), you may remember this post from 2011, where I chronicled locking ourselves in a cabin to write code and get our shit together. We shot about 20% of that video on that trip, so I thought I’d include some behind-the-scenes photos of the project.

All the equipment used to shoot it:

Josh working away on the software-side of things:

The camera running all-the-while:

“That’s a nice view”:

Sunset at Sand Harbor:

View from a highway turnout we found on the Southern Nevada side:

Moonset from Sand Harbor:

On Interfering with Local Culture

Hal — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:01:26 +0000

Yesterday was the Equinox. How do I know this? Yesterday evening while I was shooting a 3-hour timelapse for Magic Window, my carefully selected spot was briefly the prime spot for a large effigy burning.

Let me explain.

While traveling for Magic Window, I have a pretty good system worked out for picking locations. Before I even head to a new city, I tend to study Wikipedia, Flickr, and maps to decide what I want to shoot and where best to shoot it from, taking into account angles, where the sun will be setting and at what time, and how busy a location might be. In a tourist city like Prague, this is very important. Once I get there I usually spend a few hours location scouting earlier in the day before I commit to a location for three hours.

My location today was a small island in the middle of the river with a direct view of the 14th century-built Charles Bridge, also an internationally-known landmark slammed with tourists. Shooting on the bridge itself can only be accomplished at sunrise, and I haven’t done that yet.

So, at around 4:30pm, I get to my previously scouted spot to find absolutely perfect conditions, and few people in sight. Without too many people around I’m free to relax and not worry about being sold trinkets or being distracted by hustlers and pickpockets, both of which have happened, although I’ve yet to have anything stolen.

The location was quiet, with the occasional couple holding hands and looking at the scenery or a tourist coming by to snap a few photos and leave.

I set up my camera at the very apex of the island, and noticed a rock with some kind of symbol embedded in it, which i thought nothing of besides “that looks interesting”. Deciding that this was the best location to get the widest shot, I set the timer and sat down under a tree a few yards away.

A little over an hour later, I noticed a large group of people walking towards me banging drums and singing, a few with dogs and small children. The children and dogs immediately ran towards the water, making me very nervous. For a few long minutes I did nothing, until the children decided to duck under my tripod legs while playing. I lept up and started shouting at them “Too close! Don’t touch it!” over and over again, which meant nothing because they didn’t speak English. One little girl stuck her tongue out at me and ducked under the camera again. Never having dealt with this situation before, I had no idea how to handle somebody else’s misbehaving children that didn’t speak the same language as me. Eventually an adult came over, scolded the children in Czech, and pulled them away. Meanwhile people were coming up to the rock-symbol, rubbing it, and walking away.

I stood by my camera uncomfortably, trying to keep an eye on it as well as my backpack with my other camera, iPad, and a half-dozen lenses in it. I had no idea what was going on but I was in the very center of it. Eventually an adult with a camera came up to me.

“You speak English?” he asked.

“Yes!” I said, thankful that somebody else did.

“Is this a timelapse you’re doing?”

“Yup. Can I… Leave this here?”

“How long are you going to be here?”

“Oh, until it gets dark. 7:15 or so.” (A full hour and a half)

“Oh. Do you suppose you could come back tomorrow?”

“Aaaahhh… Errmmm… No… I’m only here a few days, and I’ve been here an hour and a half already, I’m kind of committed to this location now. There was nobody here when I got here, and I didn’t know you guys were going to need this spot. It’s too late for me to find another one now. I feel bad though, but this is my work and I came here from California to shoot timelapses in Prague.”

“Okay, okay, I understand. We’re going to burn a large doll and throw it in the river. We do this every year for the equinox to celebrate the end of winter. Is that okay with you? This -is- the prettiest spot in Prague!.”

Now, at this point I had no idea how I had convinced him that he now needed my permission. I felt very weird about it though, after all they were locals, this was their city, not mine, and I was in their yearly equinox spot, literally on top of what appeared to be a sacred symbol, and I had just shouted at their kids. I was keenly aware that the “right” thing to do was to pack up and go, and I was already mentally prepared to do just that. All this was running through my mind, and what came out of my mouth was “Of course! Please do!”

“Okay. We can throw it over that way if you like.” He gesticulated away from the camera. “But we usually throw it over here. I don’t want to ruin your shot,” he said without any trace of sarcasm.

“Oh, that’s fine, no problem!”

“You should take pictures!”

I had just noticed that I had an icy death grip on my second camera, which I had hastily taken out of the bag for protection. The man walked off, talked to someone else, and immediately a large effigy that I hadn’t noticed before was lifted up to loud applause, a surge in drum beating, and some chanting in Czech.

Within moments it was on fire. Another man waded out into the water, shouted something in Czech, and threw it as far as he could. There was much loud applause as the smoldering mannequin drifted down the river and under the bridge.

I’ve synced the timestamp metadata from my two cameras (one was on an intervalometer, the other handheld) on the photos below and put them in order:

15 minutes later the group had broken up without anyone else speaking to me, and I was left alone again for another hour and a half as daylight melted away on the last day of winter.

I think there is a lesson to be learned here. I’m not sure if it’s “be more respectful to local cultures” or if it’s “be assertive and people will respect you”.

Either way, I felt like kind of an asshole for most of yesterday evening.

…That is, until I downloaded the photos and realized that the kids had indeed bumped my tripod and I had to spend 40 minutes lining everything up in post.

Washington, DC

Hal — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:07:23 +0000

The first person to comment on how horribly behind I am on my backlog gets… I dunno, karma or something.

Meanwhile, I’ll do things in reverse. Here is just one photo, and five timelapses without sound from Washington, DC, where I was about three weeks ago. (I’ll try to post three weeks of photos over the next few days, so that when I’m all caught up I can actually spend time writing about experiences)

Charleston, South Carolina

Hal — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 22:57:16 +0000

After New Orleans, I made my way by train up to Charlotte, North Carolina, rented a car, and headed South. I spent an entire week traveling around South Carolina, between a few days in Columbia and a few days in Charleston.

I’d never been to South Carolina before, and what I found there blew my mind. Both Charleston and Columbia have amazing nightlife (better than every city of a comparable size I’ve been to, and most cities in general), and an emerging art scene. I came to visit a (not-so-old) friend, and wound up making a lot of new ones.

Above and below: my friend Jessica, who I lived with in San Francisco in 2010. She recently moved back to Columbia, SC.

I’ve also never shot more timelapse scenes of one area in as short a time as I did in Columbia and Charleston in one week. The weather barely cooperated with me in New Orleans, and I got almost completely rained out of DC, but while there were some pretty hardcore storms in South Carolina, not only did I (mostly) avoid getting completely rained on, but the weather put on an amazing show in all of the timelapse scenes I shot there.

All of the images in this post are shot from a single location with my A camera, while my B camera was shooting the timelapse at the very top. More photos after the jump.

New Orleans, By Day

Hal — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:09:48 +0000

In New Orleans, I spent a few hours wandering around between shooting timelapses. Again, I didn’t have time to pick music for these scenes, so think of it as an animated photo.

I rather liked the shapes of the shadow cast on the wall that this man on a ladder was making.

Joan of Arc

Above, a local artists’ tools. Below, the artist.

I love these old painted signs. Decades after being last panted, and even with a window cut into the wall long after, the advertisement is still visible.

Sand Harbor State Park, Lake Tahoe

Hal — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:09:42 +0000

Following up on my other post about my travels to Lake Tahoe, I figured I’d post some photos from Tahoe that aren’t of the team working.

Here’s one of two timelapses I shot, this one in Sand Harbor State Park on the Nevada side:

And these are… well, the rest are from Sand Harbor too. I shot these with my other camera while the timelapse camera was doing it’s thing.

Oregon Coast

Hal — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 23:45:34 +0000

Last week Josh and I drove from Portland, Oregon down to San Francisco, back along the coast route. The plan was to put together a whole Magic Window pack in two days, beating our record of shooting the whole Las Vegas pack in four. (And before that, the New York City pack in five).

We got some great content. I’d have loved to spend more time shooting more sunset and sunrise scenes, but I’m really thrilled with what we got.

Here’s frames from the rest of the take: