Early photography was used for one thing: To freeze time. You've probably heard the story of how in 1872, California Governor Leland Stanford hired early photographer Eadweard Muybridge to capture still shots of a galloping horse to settle the bet of whether all four feet would ever be simultaneously in the air.
Nowadays we increasingly blend photography into time-lapse footage, with a goal opposite to freezing time: We try to blend discrete moments into fast-forwarded video, greatly increasing the speeds at which an event appears to unfold. In 30 YouTube seconds puppies turn five years older, dieters get skinnier, you go through a season's worth of outfits. As it once titillated 19th-Century folk to see something in motion frozen still, we now get a kick of seeing frozen moments advanced into rapid motion.
Here are three of the most recent time-lapse vids to catch my eye, in order of grandeur:The first is pretty cool, a series of blended snapshots taken by the International Space Station as it orbits the planet, essentially turning the vid into a fly-over of Earth faster than any aircraft could manage:
The second video is a ground-level version of that, if a bit more difficult to visually parse since the shots are not seamless. YouTube user SmithJE77 programmed his Droid X to snap a photo every 90 seconds as he drove across America, from Seattle to Maine:
The third video doesn't involve travel at all, and could be titled "How to build Hell in three minutes." It's a time-lapse of construction workers building a cubicle farm for a high-speed call center. You can almost feel your soul leaving your body as the room nears completion:
By the way, a Wired article on the Muybridge horse photos had a quote on photography by the sculptor Auguste Rodin that I thought was interesting:
It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop.
It doesn't fast-forward, either. But everyone loves a pretty lie.
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