How Do You Make a Time Slice Photo?

We’ve seen timelapse and we’ve seen hyperlapse. But what’s time slicing? To quote photographer Dan Marker-Moore,

“A time slice is more than a photograph. A time slice takes a series of photographs and combines them into one single image. It takes slices of the same photograph offset in time from several seconds up to a few minutes.”

Marker-Moore is a passionate photographer. But before he’s a photographer, he’s a motion graphics and animation artist by profession. The passion to shoot images just intersperses with his work—during, before, and after.

It’s because of this all-consuming passion for photography, and specifically the love for creating time-slices, that Marker-Moore found himself in two of the largest cities in the world: Hong Kong and Shanghai. Hong Kong, the city of skyscrapers, and Shanghai, the largest city in the world in terms of population, are both unique in their own ways. The two cities posed several challenges for the photographer, but he still managed to capture the inherent beauty of these places in his images, which he converted to time slices.

He wanted to show the transition of day to night in the cities. To do this, he shot well over 30,000 images for this project.

Time Slice Post-Processing

This is a brief look at Marker-Moore’s post-processing workflow:

  1. Import the images into Lightroom and color correct them.
  2. Export the sequence of final images into After Effects.
  3. Offset the images as layers in time.
  4. Find the size and shape of the slice.

Here are a few of the time slice images that he created:

tips to shoot time-slice

Time sliced image of Shanghai

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Time sliced image of Hong Kong

Have you tried making a time slice? Show us your results!

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