time-lapse

Its called time-lapse photography and one of the newest to receive critical acclaim  in motion photography is Dominic Boudreault from Quebec.He has gained a certain measure of notoriety from his video titled “The City Limits”. Shot over twelve months, it features time-lapse footage from Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Manhattan and Chicago. It is all set to the composition “Time” by Hans Zimmer from the film “Inception”.

According to Isabelle Porter in Le Devoir, Boudreault works for SEPAC and video is a side-line. Last year, another video, just on Quebec City also received critical interest. Read More:http://www.dominicboudreault.com/

Eadweard Muybridge (1830 1904) was  the pioneering photographer in developing the idea of motion photography. Fortunately for him and photography, things were different in the nineteenth-century. He killed his wife’s lover but,  killing a man for sleeping with your wife was considered a justifiable homicide.Remember, not that far back,English men were engaging in murderous duels over many and sundry concerns, some quite trivial.  Not sure what the law was if Mrs. Muybridge had been sleeping with a woman.

In any event, Muybridge is probably most remembered for his ‘Time Lapse’ photography of horses. It started when tycoon Leland Standford asked Muybridge to photograph his horse to settle a bet with a friend. Standford was convinced his horse lifted all four feet off the ground while galloping. So, he was looking for photographic evidence. The experiment was put on standby during the murder trial with the photographer’s legal tab borne by Standford. These were perhaps  the earliest scientifc photographs and it paved the way for the advent of moving film.

---In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge made history by capturing sequential photographs of individual intervals of a horse in motion. By thwarting time in such dramatic fashion, Muybridge positioned himself at the frontier of the moving image, and his photographs seem inseparable from the very trajectory of history he foretold: one in which cutting edge technology would be able to decipher processes that had been up till then literally a blur. But now, in 2010, it must be admitted that the clarity that trajectory portended may not be the actual end result at all.---Read More:http://ejmuybridge.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/heirs-to-muybridge-time-lapse/

Later, Standford published a book which Muybridge felt did not give him  enough credit and they went to court to settle the dispute which Muybridge lost.  As one can see, the horse actually does lift all its feet off the ground and is an example of how this inventive photographer shaped the world in which we live.

Modern time lapse photography involves image degradation through manipulation or enhancing natural cycles of time which are, in a sense, complementary to Muybridge. However, it disrupts the sequence and linearity of Muybridge’s motion studies. So, what we are viewing then is a disruption and a restructuring of narrative which creates its own aesthetic:

When we talk about time lapse, in contrast to what Muybridge was attempting, slowing down a real event, we are more interested in speeding up an event. Although you still string multiple images together, as in the Muybridge experiment, the difference is that you program the camera to pause slightly between each photo. You then run these frames together at a common speed, i.e. 24 frames per second. By doing this, you create the illusion of watching an event occur many times faster than it did. The first recorded use of this technique was done by the cinemagician Georges Méliès in a feature film called Carrefour De L’Opera in 1897. Of course many others soon followed.Read More:http://www.digital-photography-school.com/an-introduction-to-time-lapse-photography

ADDENDUM:

This also might be of some interest:
Krowswork Gallery is pleased to present Time(Lapse), an exhibition featuring photography, video, and installation by Drone Dungeon, Katja Mater, Kim Miskowicz, and Liena Vayzman. …Each of them is working to overlap and condense accumulated motion and time into singular imagery—an effort that purposely nullifies the sequential rationale of the original motion studies and obscures the very intelligibility Mu

You can also see the conjunction between modern time lapse photography, animation, and video art:

John Davies: Norman M. Klein’s brilliant “Animation as Baroque: Fleischer Morphs Harlem; Tangos to Crocodiles” argues that the governing concept of animation is “the morph,” the theatrical rupture of the stable image in the transformation of a thing into something else. For Klein, it is a space of entropy within a cartoon itself-an actual “lapse” of scribbles between two more fixed images. The “morph” is a metaphoric, frequently haunted “hesitation” that embodies all our anxieties about the world around us, and it is shorthand for the entire medium’s proclivity for constant metamorphosis….

…Klein and Krauss bring out another theme of the anthology: animation’s messy relationship to the indexical real-particularly to historical trauma and the darker aspects of human experience. In fact, the playful fa seems to hide something quite sinister, whether in the baroque grotesqueries of Dave and Max Fleischer’s classic cartoons of the thirties, the haunted architectutes of Jeremy Blake’s “time-based, painterly hallucinations,” the unbridled animism of the Brothers Quays’ mechanical miniatures, or the spasmodic bodies of Wrik Mead’s claustrophobic queer nightmares.Read More:http://www.filmstudies.ca/journal/pdf/cj-film-studies171_Gehman_sharpest.pdf