Inspired by Carolina’s beautiful time-lapse photography of the life and growth of basil, I have done a quick and dirty time-lapse movie of my own. I have a Mac and one of the old-fashioned non-builtin iSight webcams. I thought there must be a way to capture images from it at a low frame rate and combine them into a time-lapse video. A very neat little application is Gawker, which allowed me to do this nicely. Its as easy as point and shoot!
The iSight comes with a magnetic base, which I positioned on the metallic top of a caffetiere and pointed out of my office window from 5pm – 9am a few nights ago. The video isn’t spectacular (being of a university car park) but its quite reassuring to see the sunset and rise, academics leave the car park at >10pm and the cleaners pick our bins up at 12.30am (a single frame where the light in my office comes on). It captures a frame every 30 seconds and combines them into a video at 25 frames a second. The whole thing is about 1.5 minutes.
YouTube has slightly munged the first 3 seconds grrrrrr