As a visual communicator, I’m always looking for different ways to tell a story. And as a photographer, I’ve always been drawn to the way time plays a role in imagery.

An image could be a split second, freezing time at just the right moment in what photographers call “The Decisive Moment”. Take Bresson Henri Cartier’s images above for example. The moments he decides to capture incorporate a moment of tension, which forces viewers to think beyond the image, not just what’s on the surface.

An image could also pack longer moments into a single frame, by exposing for much longer than a split second. This can be used for a variety of reasons, such as showing the path of stars as the earth rotates, or the passing of cars in front of your restaurant. It can help to create a sense of time passing, a sense of movement, and something eye-catching that people can't see without the use of a camera.

City of Angels Timelapse from Geoff Roseborough on Vimeo

But sometimes an image isn’t the right way to tell a specific story. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I wanted to give myself a project to get to know a part of this city, while exploring one of the first things to catch my eye: Downtown LA’s skyline. I knew right away that a timelapse video would be the perfect way to represent the energy and life of DTLA’s busy streets against its beautiful buildings. By juxtaposing timelapse footage of movement with subtle pans and zooms focused towards the architecture, the two elements begin to emphasize one another.There’s plenty of real-world applications for timelapse work for brands to tell their stories, especially with a platform like Instagram where you’ve only got 15 seconds to tell your story. The North Face provided a great example of this a year ago at the 2014 Ultra-Trail Du Mont-Blanc. The key for making a timelapse work in 15 seconds is to maintain focus and clarity. In this video, The North Face kept its video to only three elements: an opening frame to set context, the length of the line (which is where the timelapse really comes into play) and then a momentary pause at the end on a single person, which helps re-humanize the video since changing video speeds can become disorienting at times.

A video posted by The North Face (@thenorthface) on Aug 27, 2014 at 1:33pm PDT

Another great example comes from The White House, which used this technique to jam-pack a White House tour into 15 seconds. They were smart and paused in each room for a moment, but all the inbetween moments moving from one room to the next can easily be sped up without losing anything important. That said, leaving them in the video makes more sense than cutting them out entirely. They act as transitions and help viewers make the connection that we’re taking a tour of the White House, whereas just cutting together a single image from each room wouldn’t have that same effect.

Want to walk around the White House? Take a 15-second tour right now! #Hyperlapse A video posted by The White House (@whitehouse) on Aug 27, 2014 at 6:38pm PDT

My final example, comes from the opening weekend of The Village at Westfield Topanga. The opening weekend was packed full of events, workshops, food, and of course new stores. They sent Socialtyze out to help document the weekend and share all the fun on their social channels, and one of the best ways for us to do that was to capture a short video of all the excitement. So we went out into the crowds with a Go-Pro, capturing second long clips of all the events, stores, and little details in the shopping center, and cut them all together with music that matched the tone and pace of the day. It was low on production needs, fairly simple to do, and in the end, painted a great picture of what the day was like for everyone there.

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