Animating change

 

Time-lapse photos record changes in the garden,
gradual, subtle and interconnected.

Compare this with a frame from a sequence taken later this year (29 October).

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Just before 8am I attached the small digital camera to the mount set up in the front garden for the morning time-lapse sequence – four photos each day (or as close to that as possible).

Today’s sun cast sharp shadows against the fence, the native grasses, and other nearby foliage. Because the sun was in the sky behind my camera, it’s shadows defined the dimensions of the forms both within and beyond the field of vision. I was fascinated to watch how they moved together – the forms before me (the garden) and the forms behind (the buildings next door). I took more than the four pictures I’d intended, tracking the shadows-shaping of the forms in four dimensions: skinks crawling to the light advancing on a tree stump, the sun’s warmth steaming moisture from the wood after recent rain.

Gentle breezes came and went, and I remembered accounts I’ve read of Antarctic winds suddenly arising out of nowhere.

***

Snow drifts through her. All sense of scale changes as small figures emerge. Drift plays, then passes, revealing their tracks far below, inching over still, hard ice.