It’s been at least six years since I last played around with time lapse photography. On my last half-hearted attempt, I tried to capture the rising tide surrounding the Floating Torii in Miyajima, with no tripod and a not-so-great camera. Ever since, I’ve been wanting to capture something on a grand scale, something like the grayness that envelops San Francisco every summer, but until this weekend I never worked up the energy and patience to try it out.

I spend a lot of time idly looking out our windows, watching the fog and clouds that drift past. Life in the Inner Sunset is often dictated by the low clouds that peel back for (at best) a couple hours in mid-afternoon before roaring back towards downtown just before supper time. I got a bit lucky this weekend in that I was able to capture the three most common variations on this theme: 1) dense, quickly moving fog; 2) thick, slower moving clouds that periodically tease us with views of the downtown skyline; 3) light cloud cover that reveals blue skies before engulfing the entire city just before sunset. I was slightly disappointed that the blue sky lasted so long on Monday if only because it makes for a less interesting time lapse, but the dark clouds that take over at the very end are worth the wait. At the very least, I’m glad that I was able to capture a typical summer scene before our perfect Indian summer sets in this week.

Anyway, the video is available on YouTube and embedded below as well (best viewed at 720p). The frames were captured using my Canon 7D. I created the video clips using Lightroom’s slideshow mode, but unfortunately all I had available for editing purposes was an ancient version of iMovie, so the quality is awful, especially during the fade transitions. I learned a lot this weekend, and next time around I’ll use more care in the way I shoot (and post-process).