R O U T E   6 6 - the time lapse project

To truly document the journey down Route 66, I secured a digital SLR equipped with a wide-angle lens to my dashboard, and programmed a Pclix intervalometer to take one photo every few seconds. After six weeks and over 2400 miles, I arrived in Santa Monica, CA with over 60,000 stills taken through the windshield. Sequenced together into one video piece, the trip takes just over a half hour. Although the video journey moves at breakneck speed, it is quite hypnotic, and one finds oneself transfixed to the screen, watching the landscape quickly change as we move through towns, across open fields and deserts, over hills and into cities. I am in the process of packaging the time lapse document into a virtual road trip DVD.

Interestingly, although the photos taken with the dashboard D-SLR were generated automatically by the intervalometer, there are many striking images in the collection; some rather “happy accidents”. I have culled a large selection of these individual stills from the series, allowing viewers to stop the hurried pace of the virtual journey and explore the myriad light, landscape and landmarks of old Route 66. The online portfolio shows only a fraction of those selected images. 37 of the prints were recently exhibited at the Art Gallery of Windsor, but for future exhibitions the grid could be expanded to fill an entire gallery, and could be accompanied with a projection of the time lapse video.

Is the photographer truly acting as photographer when the photos are being snapped by an automatic device? Does this experiment simply demonstrate the notion of “take enough pictures, some are bound to turn out”? Is simply showing up and being there enough? The time lapse video, along with the rows of printed stills from the series, provokes thoughts about authorship, technology, and the speed at which progress creates obsolescence – not only in the realms of photography and communication, but in communities themselves. Route 66 was rendered obsolete when the larger, faster interstate highway system was born, cutting off its towns from the lifeblood of tourist dollars.

dashboard photos

segments of dashboard time lapse video (YouTube)
(note these are only low-res online segments to show time-lapse concept; final video is high-res and very smooth)

Route 66 time lapse prints installed at Art Gallery of Windsor and time lapse video at Artcite