The Exploratorium has a great series of events they put on in collaboration with Make Magazine and Pixar. They’re having another this Saturday from 10AM to 2PM, and the theme is time. I’ll have my multi-projector setup showing some of my Panoramic Time-Lapse pieces in the museum’s Tinkering Studio. (And they’ll continue to be on display for some time after the event.)

There will be a great lineup, including my friends the Evil Mad Scientists showing off some of their inventive clock projects, the retro-futurists Five Ton Crane, and lots of other great makers.

Here’s a post on Make Magazine’s blog about one of the earlier Open Makes I participated in.

Also, Wired featured one of my panoramic time-lapse movies in an online video gallery.

(Book cover photos by Lenore M. Edman, www.evilmadscientist.com)

Here’s a look at the inside, amazingly illustrated by Alexander Tarrant:

Blinkybugs sense movement, wind and vibration through there antennae, which causes their eyes to blink. It’s a very simple design using a coin-cell battery, a couple LEDs, and antennae made from guitar string, yet they have a strangely life-like quality. They’ve been a huge hit at the Maker Faire, and they’re a great way to teach kids basic ideas about electricity. Here’s one of the bugs:

Also there’s my LED Art Kit, available through MakerShed. Make your own groovy light-art with this simple kit (originally created as an Instructable):

Long exposure at Ocean Beach.

Time-lapse is a photographic technique that allows us to tune into events that normally unfold at a pace too slowly to observe directly: the movement of clouds, the rising and setting of the sun, or the incremental growth of plant life.

Whether you’re a science teacher, a parent or kid interested in photography, or someone who just wants to learn something new, time lapse is a great way to observe the world from a different vantage point.

The technique entails shooting images at regular intervals, then playing them back to create a moving image. In this sense it’s like shooting a film or video. The difference is that with traditional film and video, images are captured at the same rate they’re played back (e.g., at 24 frames per second), whereas with time-lapse, the images are captured at a much slower rate–in other words, at a much longer interval between shots. When these images are played back at typical video frame rates, it looks like fast-forwarded reality.

Read the rest on MindShift…

This is at the Wave Organ. This was my first experiment shooting at sunset:

This next one I shot this summer at the Mendocino Headlands. It was shot over a couple hours, and I used a longer exposure to smooth out the water a bit, to put more of an emphasis on the more gradual tidal movements. I like how the kelp bed slowly swirls and shifts around:

For the last one, I didn’t shoot a full 360-degrees, which is why there are two windows that don’t quite line up.

Previously: Panoramic Time-Lapse Movies

Originally I only intended to show the full-year version nice and big as a projected installation, but I think it works well as an online video. However I encourage you to view it full-screen at 1080p! Here’s a direct link.

(* Actually, it’s 360 days, because easier to make a nice rectangle that way.)

A bit more about the project: I installed a custom camera rig on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in SF, which captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds, around the clock, for a year. From these images, I created an array of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day, arranged chronologically, and playing in sync. My intention was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year. More info about the project here.

Here are some previous versions I made along the way. They have fewer days, but have better resolution per day. 126 days:

42 days:

Some of my other time-lapse projects:

• Panoramic Time-Lapse
• SF MUNI Demolition/Construction

UPDATE: The Atlantic is featuring this video along with a short interview with me here.

This one is just Meredith:

Here’s the page on Popular Mechanics.

The Exploratorium has hired me to create a multi-year series of time-lapse movies as they prepare their future home at Pier 15. This involved setting up another custom shooting rig, similar to the one I used for my History of the Sky project. Shooting began last November, and will continue until the Museum opens at the new location in 2013.

A selection of the movies can be seen here on the newly launched Exploratorium Piers website.

And here’s a bit of time-lapse video of the bomb-proof tripod being built in the Exploratorium shop, under the guidance of their exhibit builder, Earl Stirling:

(Note that this was shot by the camera system that was eventually installed in the tripod, so in a sense it’s watching itself being built, which is trippy.)