journal

My time-lapse obsession

I continue to be obsessed with and fascinated by time-lapse photography. You can see symptoms of my time-lapse madness on Vimeo and YouTube. I am particularly drawn to time lapse as a tool that can be used to document and analyze the changing situation on the ground around in and around the Atlantic Yards project site in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It's also just cool (e.g. this and this).

Ground was officially broken on March 11, 2010 for the Barclays Center Arena, the portion of the project that developer Forest City Ratner seems most interested in building.  The timetable for the remainder of the project (16 skyscrapers over the remainder of the 22-acre site) is a moving target, subject to the developer's economic situation. The developer continues to state it will take 10 years to complete the entire project, but there are more than a few skeptics that believe it will take much longer, possibly 25+ years.

The time-lapse below was shot the afternoon of September 16, 2010, hours before at least 2 tornados touched down in Brooklyn and Queens. I planned to shoot that day as the weather forecast called for thunderstorms to roll in and I hoped that it would bring dramatic clouds with it. The clouds weren't that spectacular for this shoot, but I ironically was able to capture them cutting down one of the last trees on the arena site. Maybe they could have saved themselves some trouble and let the tornados take care of it.

This was shot from the north side of Atlantic Avenue, facing south.  Flatbush Avenue is on the right. One of the two last buildings on the arena site, 636 Pacific Street, is visible in the background to the left.