Time Travels: Marsh Plaza Bird’s-eye
Looking down on the open space in the middle
Get the Flash Player to see this media.
This time-lapse of Marsh Plaza was taken from the fifth floor of the School of Theology. Shooting began at 3 p.m. with a shot interval of one second. Propping the camera up high enough to frame Commonwealth Avenue and the Free at Last sculpture in the middle of the plaza was the easy part. Making sure a custodian didn’t take the camera down was the real challenge. The video was encoded at 30 frames per second.
The technique of time-lapse photography has been around for years, but never seems to get old. This year, with the help of mechanical engineering student and photography enthusiast Peter Moriarty (ENG’11), BU Today is bringing you familiar sights in a way you’ve never seen them before.
The key to successful time-lapse photography is to determine how to manipulate time to produce the most interesting images. The photographer must set two key variables. First, how often do you want the camera to record an image? Second, once you’ve gathered images, how quickly do you want to play them?
Got an idea for a time-lapse on or around campus? Share it with us. Think large or small, indoors or out. If we follow through in our weekly series, you’ll get credit, but even better, we’ll all get a great new set of images and a deeper appreciation of where we stand, and live.
Edward A. Brown can be reached at ebrown@bu.edu.
Comments & Discussion
Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.