When Old Techniques Are New Again

Movies remain simply a series of still images strung together to create the illusion of motion. However, this is typically employed to generate the sense of having captured something in time that could have also been seen by the viewer. Very different is another old approach to capturing the world, albeit in a specialized way. I'm speaking here of timelapse photography, in which each spot in the sequence is separated from the others by a significant amount of time. French photographer Mayeul Akpovi is one of the few to specialize in this, with his site providing several nifty examples. My favorite is Paris in Motion, in which the camera is often moved slightly between shots.