Video taken from approximately 1200 February 5, 2010 till 1800 February 6, 2010 in Alexandria, VA (5 miles south of Washington, DC).

Interval: 1 second every 1 minute; 28:31 minutes captured.

Timeline speed: video speed = 1000% original capture

Music: "Killing Time" by Kevin MacLeod Licensed under Creative Commons

The snow REALLY starts to stick at the 45 second mark!

I shot this with my Sony PDX-10 on interval. It was pointing out my window, and so during the night section it occasionally goes out of focus due to car headlights reflecting off the glass. The power also went out at 2300 and it ran on battery for nearly five hours. There is a one hour gap between when the battery finally died and when I was finally able to plug it in again the next morning at 0500.

There are many ways to shoot time-lapse and my favorite is the "blip" method. By blip, I mean that I think it's interesting to show the people appearing and disappearing throughout the video. In order to have people "ghosting" and not pop in and out like that, you'd have to drag your shutter, which means that I'd have to slow my shutter speed down while shooting so that I get more of the people in the frames while I shot it. However, I personally like the effect with the people popping in and out like little robots.

Quite a few people have noticed that the people in the video are walking down the middle of the street. Yep! After the storm, the safest place to actually walk was in the street, since the snow was packed down. If you tried to walk anywhere else, you'd fall in a snow drift. I actually appear in the video at 2:47 carrying a large black and white umbrella. I was carrying an umbrella because I was out shooting still shots and didn't want my camera to get wet.

The only real problem I'd say I had with the video was the focus problems at night. Since I had it on auto focus, the camera would refocus whenever a car was captured in a certain segment of frame. A possible solution would have been to manually focus the camera (on the tree, for instance) and then left it there all night.

A second problem was the previously mentioned power outage. Since I couldn't really do anything about that, I think my very careful camera-poking-battery-magic worked out rather well.

If I did this again, I would likely put my interval settings on 1 minute/2 seconds. I think I'd like the longer shots of people walking around. They'd still blip (which I think is cool) but they'd just blip longer.

Feel free to ask me questions or make comments by clicking "add a comment" below!

Below is a slideshow of the snow shots I took while out on that walk :)