The Origins of Time Lapse Photography.

Certain forms of time lapse photography are amongst the oldest forms of photography and a forerunner of film and cinema. In some quarters, time lapse photography is still referred to as chronophotography since chrono is the Greek word for time.

Chronophotography is certainly one of the earliest form of photography and film making, and was first used by scientists, experimenters and innovators such as Étienne-Jules Marey to characterize a group of photographs produced for the purpose of recording and then displaying successive phases of motion.

Marey and others such as Eadweard Muybridge used chronophotography for the purpose of scientific investigation, to study the movement of various human and animal subjects. In fact, there is a renowned instance that involved the use of the technique in a famous debate.

In the 1870s, Leland Stanford, who was a Californian Governor and race-horse owner, had joined a hotly disputed debate about whether all four of a horses hooves are ever off the ground at the same time during a gallop. Stanford took the position that they were. He apparently had a substantial bet with associates, and employed Eadweard Muybridge to try prove his view and to win him his bet.

Muybridge took a series of photographs to capture the movement of Stanford's racehorse. One singular image taken by Muybridge showed the horse airborne and proved Stanford's view. Not only this but further photography involving a sequenced series of images allowed the motion and movement of the racehorse be observed in detail.

The parallels with contemporary techniques and practices of time lapse photography are clear. Chronophotography, like time lapse photography, is the capture of movement over time. Since the days of Mybridge and onward to the present day, the taking and sequencing together of images has been used for functional as well as aesthetic purposes. It has been used to study workflows, capture the motion of various natural phenomenon and document construction projects for example.

Of course techniques and technologies have moved on a pace, and contemporary time owes much to people people such as John Ott, who in the 1920s set up a home made system with the use of a kitchen timer and a paperclip, to control a camera to take photos at regular intervals, to later edit together to show flowers blooming.

Time lapse, along with other photographic and cinematographic techniques, have evolved greatly since. However, because it involves the placing together of numerous still frames, then chronophotography and early versions in time lapsing were part of the eventual evolution of photography into film-making.

And like any technique, it moves onward still, and now time lapse is growing ever more sophisticated, with recent innovations in digital technologies producing ever more complex and interesting results and applications.