Teardown of a laser printer

In this age of mass consumption  and programmed obsolescence, it is not surprising that a few years after you shell out money for a printer, the availability of its consumables starts to decrease, followed by an increase of the associated price.

More in Time Lapse

And to add to the party, another bit of playing around with time lapse. This time zoomed in on the Tagus river, and obtained this interesting sequence. To achieve it, the intervalometer was set to take a picture every 10 seconds. Again, automatic settings such as ISO sensitivity and aperture were chosen. Only the focusing was kept manual.

Time lapse shooting - moving into more professional results...

While the first videos seemed pretty cool in spite its mediocre quality (maybe because of the time domain wonder of perceiving things that we normally wouldn't given the different time scale we live in), now I had to move one step further.

The idea was to use a better camera, one offering photographic quality in every single frame.

From morning until dawn - and entire day described in seconds

Time lapse video sequences can render exciting results, for the visual impact these provide. While simply being a sequence of frames more separated in time than in a conventional video, once played back at the rate the human vision considers smooth (30 frames per second) these provide a view of the world that a human cannot easily perceive directly, given the comparatively fast rate at which he summarizes and retains information. For instance a cloud in its pass has very complex yet slow changes in shape and trajectory. These are very hard for average humans to perceive, memorize and mentally reconstruct as an animated sequence of events. In general, slow changing processes are inherently hard for humans to characterize in its dynamic nature.

As such it is not surprising that a video containing nothing more than a reproduction of the real world can be appreciated by humans as being somewhat surreal, when simply the only difference is the rate at which information is sampled and later reproduced.

The first video contains about 20 hours of footage shrunk to 32 seconds. It reveals one angle of the Almada city at the south of Lisbon, where part of the 25 de Abril bridge and the Cristo Rei can be seen. It is a typical winter day in Portugal, where the fog floods the morning and a passing of dense clouds fulfills the entire afternoon. This typical day is however solitary in a atypical winter month padded with bright sunny days and mild temperatures.

The second video taken during the 27th January 2012, reveals a clear night transition to a bright winter day in the city of Almada, just south of Lisbon the capital city of Portugal. At the bottom right, the horizon is cut by a huge rectangular crane belonging to a long time decomissioned shipyard.Its name was Lisnave and would once be an important maritime reference for large ships and oil rigs which would stop by for major repairing and overhauling.