Time-lapse

Mindrelic - Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

To make the video, Owens spent the first month and a half of spring staying at eleven different Manhattan hotels, shooting from their windows and roofs for around twelve hours every day, weather permitting. (Lodging was free—in return, Owens is letting each hotel use the footage shot from its property.) His only real obstacles, he told us, were wind, snow (in April!), and people on the street. “I would often gather a crowd, mostly other photographers asking what I was doing with this strange-looking nine-foot-long thing on tripods,” he said. The tourists were more of a hazard. “People are so distracted by the lights in Times Square that I would often have to physically keep them from walking into the camera.”

Until recently, Owens shot photographs by day, then worked the night shift in the transportation department of the University of Rochester. Now he mostly makes time-lapse videos for a living. The work, he said, has made him aware of the rhythms of the universe. “Anyone who shoots time lapse can most likely tell you what phase the moon is in, what time to the minute the sun rises and sets.”

It’s also been a way, he said, to recapture with digital photography the suspense and surprise of working with film. “You don’t really know what you shot until you’re able to get home and animate all the stills together,” he said. “It’s a rush when you get to see your shot moving for the first time.”

credit: The New Yorker