Sam Rami, the director of Spiderman 2, has come up with a remarkable idea. He proposed putting cameras above major cites (he doesn’t say how he would do this), and have a camera take a picture of the city at a rate of one frame a day. The article notes that “At a frame a day, a year’s worth of shots over a particular city would add up to 15 seconds of film, a decade would blow by in two and a half minutes and a century would run 25 minutes. A full 1,000 years of film would last just over four hours.”
Just imagine this. Watching cities rise, grow, fall, and change. It would be a fascinating study. Just as we all saw the time-lapse studies of flowers when we were in science class when we were young (some of us remember Walt Disney actually liked to do films like that). I wish I could see something like that for cities over time. But then, I enjoy comparative historical photography, books such as Los Angeles Then and Now, Main Street to Malibu: Then and Now; San Francisco Then and Now; or San Fernando Valley: Then and Now. Can you imagine someone doing this for transportation systems: Watching the railroads grow and shrink, the freeway system develop, and the rate of development.
Just fascinating.
