Capturing Seattle in December

Early December in the Pacific Northwest is an odd phenomenon. Not quite winter, but not quite autumn anymore. Darkness is the rule, with both ends of your commute driven with your headlights on. By late December it seems that we’ve lost the sun altogether. It is as if the sun sort of skirts the southern horizon, perpetually obscured by clouds, darkness reigning from mid-afternoon until mid-morning, with a lingering dusk at high noon. This is because of our northern latitude. An odd irony of Seattle is that it is tucked away in the upper northwest corner of the USA … so far that we live north of the vast majority of Canadians. Yep, my friend Shaun in Guelph, Ontario lives hundreds of miles SOUTH of me, as do most everyone in the rest of Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes. The rest of Canada (except those Oiler fans) live within a slap shot of me, in terms of Latitude. The warm wet blanket of the Pacific Ocean keeps us mild and moist however, with snow a rarity and temperatures at about ideal datacenter range or a little below.

I set up my little camera, pointed out my office window looking North-Northwest yesterday a little after I started work, with iStopMotion grabbing a frame once a minute. Around mid-day I had to swap batteries, but then I left it running after I bailed out of the office around 5:30. The batteries died at some point later in the evening… I have no idea what time.

I shot and edited this in 16:9 HD. Tossed a little Sigur Rós soundtrack on it this morning in iMovie and present it now for your enjoyment… or horror if you’re one of those oddballs that prefer sunny beaches.

A little more detail about this (added Thursday, December 4, 2008): The skyscrapers of downtown Seattle are visible pretty much dead-center, slightly obscured by trees. My wide-angle lens makes downtown appear much farther away than it really is here. Yes, you can see the camera lens reflected in the window just to left of center. You can see the hands of the author banging away un-artfully at the keyboard between sundown and my departure from the office at about 5:20ish PM. I left the setup running, which it did until the batteries in the camera died around 10ish PM. The whole thing starts around 10 am so this is roughly a 12 hours timelapse. I actually went through two sets of 2 AA batteries. The camera shift a little ways into the film (~0:29) is where the first battery swap happened. I had to remove the camera from the tripod to do the swap and forgot to set up continuity markers to get it back into the right position! Watching someone learn a craft is never pleasant, but I stay as transparent as possible.