Don't know how they do this but its amazing

[NaClH2O]

Click on the link and then start your mouse at the top of the photo of Hong Kong, slowly drag it down the photo without left or right clicking, just drag it down. As the time increases from 6:10 the photo gradually gets darker and the lights come on. Completely dark night scene by the time you reach the bottom of the photo, at 7:40. Way cool

Link: http://61226.com/share/hk.swf

NaCl(any thoughts on how this was achieved? )H2O

[indytax]

very cool!

[GeneralBenson]

I don't know how, but that is seriously cool.

[pingflood]

Time lapse (probably a shot an hour or so) photography. Check out one of the boats -- it goes from being there to translucent to disappearing.

[mtroute]

Time laps multi shot. Then placed into Flash as a movie that uses action-script to follow the mouse to advances the movie.

[PolishMike]

Not even time lapse, just two shots, with the morning shot having a sliding exposure compensation as you move down the top half of the picture and then the night shot starting to fade in as the pointer is moved even lower. The illusion kind of falls apart as the images crossfade.

It's a cool technique but an actual "interactive" timelapse would have been magnificent.

[WMBP]

Originally Posted by PolishMike

Not even time lapse, just two shots, with the morning shot having a sliding exposure compensation as you move down the top half of the picture and then the night shot starting to fade in as the pointer is moved even lower. The illusion kind of falls apart as the images crossfade.

It's a cool technique but an actual "interactive" timelapse would have been magnificent.

Yes, I think PolishMike's right: this does NOT appear to be a time lapse movie. If you move the mouse very slowly and look for changes in the scene, you'll see only two distinct views. If the photographer had taken a shot every minute or even every five minutes, I'd expect to see movement on shore - but I don't. I'd expect to see the water currents changing - but they don't.

The flash programing part of it is easy to understand. The active window senses the coordinates of the mouse and displays a different version of the image accordingly. That part's trivial.

What I don't quite get is how the handful of different images were generated. It was done on the computer, of course, but using what software? I suspect it is a rather simple "morph" job, you know, like Michael Jackson made famous in the video for his song 'Black and White', where a black woman's face turns into a white woman's face, then into a white man's face, then into the face of an old Chinese man, etc. Here, I suspect the creator fed two images into the morphing software and the software did all the work.

So, while I agree it's kind of neat, in the end, I am afraid that it's FALSE and, to be candid, kind of lazy and cheap. I find this kind of thing objectionable on principle and ultimately less interesting than a more honest and more mundane time-lapse shot would have been.

Will

[dosdan]

The problem with a true time-lapse sequence of images would be the file size & load time. I suppose it depends on how many unique images were in the stack and whether you could use the technique this example uses to smooth the transitions from one image to another.

[PolishMike]

You can do image transparency in Flash, that's all this is.

And yeah, seeing as I have spent quite some taking thousands of frames for timelapse videos, this feels a bit cheap, but that does not detract from the fact that it is an effective and innovative way of presenting an image and does relay the sense of passing time and the city changing with it quite well.

[enoeske]

I did a small flash frame for my website a while ago (its not on there now) where the user could view their photos in color or black and white. I had a horizontal window that had color on one side and b&w on the other and the image in the middle. As the user slid from one to the other, the image changed.

I achieved this by using rollover effects. Several rectangles were formed and each of them had a stage in the transition from color to b&w. As the user rolled over each rectangle, the image shifted opacity toward one or the other image similar to what this does. It was pretty neat.