A Year from a Window in Oslo, Norway

February 22, 2011

A Year from a Window in Oslo Norway

Photographer: Eirik Solheim 
Summary Author: Eirik Solheim; Jim Foster

February 2011 Earth Science Picture of the Day Viewer's ChoiceThe image above showing seasonal changes in Oslo, Norway took a full year to make. January (2010) is at far left and December (2010) is at far right. I glued my single lens reflex camera (SLR) to a window in my home having a particularly nice view and kept it there for twelve months, snapping an image every thirty minutes. The result is a unique image, composed of some 16,000 photos, and two fascinating time-lapse videos (see below). You can clearly see that we have a decent summer season and a very long winter here in Oslo -- snow covers the ground for upwards of four months. However, the shoulder seasons (spring and fall) are relatively brief. The only thing different between the individual shots is the lighting -- the focus point and the f/number remained the same throughout this project.

Photo Details: Canon 400D camera with an EF-S 10-22. I mounted it on a special shelf and covered it with black cloth to avoid reflections in the window. I actually glued the camera to the shelf to make sure it wouldn’t shift. Then I did some test shots -- using ISO 400 and f/6.3. The exposure time was set to auto along with the white balance. The resolution of the approximately 16,000 images is 3,888 × 2,592 pixels. I got some generous help from my blog readers and twitter followers that helped me make a script that would take one line from the first image, the next line from the next image and so on.