“I just wanted to film everything!”
When you live here in Weehawken, NJ you see the most unbelievable New York City sunrises & sunsets. Some days at the bus stop the city will disappear into a river of fog. For a few years I was thinking - “How can I take a photo every day?” “How can I capture the sunrise everyday?” Then I decided - I need to capture ALL of it ALL the time! The 30 Year Time-Lapse was born.
-Joseph DiGiovanna (Click here for Bio)
What is the 30 Year Timelapse?
START DATE: July 11, 2015
END DATE: July 11, 2046
Q: How do you protect the camera from the weather?
A: The camera is installed inside my living room, so it's safe from the weather.
Q: What if you move? 30 years is a long time!
A: That's the first question people always ask! I own the apartment, so if I move I would just make an agreement with the renter to keep the camera in the window.
Q: What camera are you using for this project?
A: Right now the project is running on 3 Sony a7s cameras. The first one I installed has been taking a photo every 30 seconds for 6.5 years. It's never been turned off once! The a7s is an incredible camera. I use it not only for time-lapse photography, but for concerts, music videos, interviews and still portraits. It took me over three years to find the right camera. I was initially convinced that I could make the project work with a GoPro - but in the end, I could not. Additionally I have TWO 24/7 livestream cameras running. For the livestream I am using the Sony a6100. To see the livestreams click HERE. I also have a GoPro hero 9 running and a fourth Sony A7s running as a backup for the original shot.
Q: How do you get the images off the camera?
A: The cameras are each tethered to their own M1 Mac Mini - which each have two dedicated external hard drives – all of which are connected to their own uninterruptible power supply in case of a blackout. The whole system is controlled by a series of AppleScripts I wrote that run on a schedule. A homemade Arduino IR Intervalometer triggers the cameras to take a photo every 30 seconds. On the laptop there's a script that activates one minute after midnight and creates a new folder with yesterday's date – and then moves all the images created the day before into that folder. At 30 minutes past midnight, another script copies that folder onto the backup hard drive. Meanwhile, another script is constantly checking to see how many images have been made. Essentially, that script is looking after the other scripts like a tattletale. If there aren't enough images in the capture folder, that tattletale script sends me three text messages and an email - all one minute apart to be as annoying as possible.
Q: So the time-lapse is made from still photos as opposed to video?
A: Exactly. Photographing one image every 30 seconds yields 2,880 images per day. I use those images to create the time-lapse videos that I post.
Q: You must go through a ton of hard drives!
A: I do. I generate around 36GB of images per day for each camera, which adds up to roughly 13TB per year per camera - 36TB total. That's all multiplied by two since I keep backups of everything, so I spend an outrageous amount of money per year just on the hard drives.
Q: How many photos do you take each year?
A: It's funny, but it works out to just over one million photos per year – which makes the math easy for me. I'm looking forward to eventually having over 90 million photos in total.
