In recent years construction companies around Europe have been increasingly using time lapse photography to document and to monitor their construction projects. Construction companies started to use time lapse for promotion and publicity purposes and to show potential clients the entire process of construction projects, which could be displayed at lightening speed, through the sequencing together of individually shot images at around 25 frames per second.

Specialist companies had to be bought in to set up and maintain such time lapse projects, as the equipment used often had to function continuously for months and even years in the case of certain construction projects. Also, the equipment had to operate in extremes of weather, from the heat of summer to the sub-zero temperatures of the winter months.

In order to monitor that their time lapse systems were operating as they should do around the clock, and in order to back-up images being taken to a remote server, these specialist companies needed to network their equipment via broadband or 3G technologies. As they were doing this monitoring themselves, one or two specialists began to offer this service to clients. They reasoned that particularly clients in construction would find this service very useful - because at the same time as producing a time lapse, individual ‘live’ images being captured could be viewed or shared with architects, surveyors, stake holders and so on, who could sit virtually anywhere in the world and see the detail of a site.

Indeed, a site could be viewed in unprecedented detail and clarity, as the cameras used were professional DSLRs and the images they captured were higher than HD (High Definition). This meant that the images could be zoomed into as a means to check on detail, and it also meant that activities such as deliveries, and work flows could be monitored as the images were time-stamped.

Such high specification and high performance time lapse systems are also being used now for security, as these high definition images can provide obvious advantages for closely monitoring a construction site. The high resolution images enable close ups of areas of the image without losing much clarity, making faces and features on the frame much clearer than ever seen before. This gives them a huge advantage over more convention CCTV camera systems, which only generally produce lower grade images. The time lapse cameras not only provide the high grade images – but produce the moving time lapse sequence at the end!

The set up and operation of such systems is not easy, and few companies manage it successfully. Time Lapse Photography Companies such this are few and far between and are usually innovators as well as people merely able to harness new technologies.