New Media Initiatives intern Lauren Pond recently made this time lapse of the light in our Kogod Courtyard. Here's her story.
On the first day of my internship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the other interns in my program and I went on a museum tour. One of the places we visited was the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard. I remember marveling at its unique architecture and appreciating its tranquil atmosphere.
Over the next several weeks, I regularly spent my lunch breaks in the courtyard, a popular lunch spot for many. It was during one of these visits that I noticed the latticed shadow pattern cast on the wall by the courtyard’s roof. As a photographer, I’m interested in the interplay of light and shadow, and I began to think of ways I could incorporate these shadows into a project.
Capturing the images for the elapsed time piece took most of a day. Starting at about 11 a.m., I fixed my camera in a certain position, then set it to shoot one photo every fifteen seconds for the next six hours. Afterward, I used a video-editing program to combine the approximately 1,500 photos. In the resulting video, the shadows are no longer the seemingly still pattern that one would see during a visit to the courtyard; instead, they shift quickly with the sun, illustrating the building’s continual interaction with the outside world.
