The Foliage Time-Lapse Project

Work in progress toward time-lapse movies of day-by-day changes in foliage color throughout the year.

(Haven't been here since last year? Check out what I'm doing in 2009)

Anacostia River, Washington, D.C.

These time-lapse series show the seasonal day-by-day change in foliage captured in the stillness of early mornings, occasionally accented by mist over the water or darkening of tree trunks by rain.

Click on a link below and, after a few seconds for images to load, the movie will start. Expand the browser window to full screen for best viewing. The window goes to black at the end of the movie. Click on your Reload/Refresh button to restart it, or your Back button to return to this page. If it doesn't work, check to make sure that your browser has Javascript enabled.

Series A, March 28 to June 6, 2008 -- Wide-angle (unzoomed) view
Series B, March 28 to May 16, 2008 -- Zoom view to left of Series A
Series D, April 10 to May 10, 2008 -- Full zoom on maple tree in Series B
Series E, September 27 to November 20, 2008 -- Same view as Series A
Series F, September 27 to November 20, 2008 -- Same view as Series B
Series G, September 27 to November 20, 2008 -- Detail of Series F view at full resolution

Objective

My ultimate goal is to produce a six-minute video for large-screen high-definition TV of daily foliage changes spanning a full year. There are challenges, both technical and esthetic, in assembling a series of one-per-day landscape photos into a seamless movie. I intend to address them using my experience in developing image processing software. This Web site is a first approximation that will show spring and fall seasons at reduced size.

Technical

Each time-lapse series is a sequence of still photos taken once per day. I want to avoid shadows in the images, so on clear days I shoot before sunrise. Another advantage of shooting in the early morning is that the air is relatively calm, minimizing wind motion of foliage that would make it look jittery in the movie.

My camera is an Olympus SP-350 used in the RAW mode with shutter priority. This camera has optical zoom, making digital enlargement unnecessary. However, I have made use of cropping to remove sky, which otherwise would have been a distracting element in these movies. I adjust the overall brightness of individual images and their balance of red, green, and blue, but do not manipulate contrast, saturation, sharpness or other variables, either globally or locally.

I do the image processing with ImageMagick and my own software. I also used GIMP and xv during software development. A key element in my Web presentation is some Javascript code that I found here. At full resolution, the images are about 3000 pixels across, which would require a video screen about a meter wide, so for the Web movie I have subsampled them and used JPEG compression.

Background

During the 1990s I had a programming job at NASA in Maryland. The glorious autumn foliage along the nearby Baltimore-Washington Parkway started me thinking about how to make a time-lapse movie of seasonal foliage changes. By 2000 good digital cameras had become affordable. For the next few years I considered various sites around Washington for how they would be illuminated at various hours and whether I would be able to get to them every day. My first project was in 2007 at a park in Suitland, Maryland near my current job. The site I finally settled on is a view of the grounds of the National Arboretum from across the Anacostia River.


Last modified: April 13, 2009

Charles Packer mailbox@cpacker.org