New Year's Eve timelapse

New Year's Eve timelapse, originally uploaded by DC Products.

For my second timelapse (here's the first), I set up my camera in a corner of the living room on New Year's Eve. My wife and I were in the Boston suburb of Milton, Mass., staying with my college roommate, Bryan, and his husband for their annual party. Casey and I have gone up for several years now, so it's become a great tradition we both enjoy.

My first thought was to set up the camera in the kitchen to document Casey's preparations for the party (it's her thing), but there was no out-of-the-way place to set up the tripod. This spot in the living room was the next-best thing, because it shows the path to the kitchen through the dining room and also contains the TV, where we all gathered at midnight.

The music for this version is Frightened Rabbit's "Extrasupervery," chosen for the simple fact that it was the only song on my computer that came close to the 87-second length of the video. All the rest of my music was on an external hard drive at home, and I didn't feel like shortening a different track. (When I posted the video to YouTube, I just went with one of the tracks available on that site.)

Christmas lights time-lapse, December 2010

Christmas lights time-lapse, originally uploaded by DC Products.

My first time-lapse! I've been dying to try this and decided that putting up the Christmas lights was as good a subject as any. Now I'm hooked.

It's 729 frames, at 2 seconds per exposure, taken every 10 seconds and put together at 18 frames per second. I doubled up (by 10) on a few frames (you'll notice them) for the heck of it.

But here's the lesson to learn: Be sure to check your photo applications thoroughly before buying software. I missed that Picasa -- the awesome free photo editing software -- has a "time lapse" setting in its movie maker and it allows for several speeds of frames per second. So I went and bought QuickTime Pro, which wasn't as flexible (or as easy to add music to). It was a not-cheap (but not outrageous) $30 (anything more and I wouldn't have bought it; if only it were $35). Oh well. Just gonna have to sell some things on eBay.

At least I'm happy with the end result.

Day 360 of 365

Bedford Springs' indoor pool

After a leisurely, slow morning, we headed out with Casey's dad and stepmom to the step-grandparents' house and on an errand before a trip to Bedford Springs, a hotel and resort in the Pennsylvania countryside. It's a sprawling resort dating back to the 1800s, with the lobby adorned with various artifacts, photos and guest ledgers and records books from past centuries. After lunch, we walked through the lobbies and sitting rooms and ducked into the indoor pool, which was active on a cold, foggy, winter day. It's an interesting scene -- I can't say I've ever been swimming with a Christmas tree on display near the pool.

Day 359 of 365

A wet white Christmas

This is Christmas in Johnstown, 2009: a light freezing rain pelts the windows and forming a crisp coating over the snow in the yard. Luckily, we're comfortable and warm inside, with no place to go all day.

Happy Christmas to all!

Day 358 of 365

Christmas Eve afternoon

We had a bright, sunny day for our drive across Pennsylvania and we arrived in Johnstown to find about eight inches of snow on the ground. A lot of the pine trees still held snow on their boughs, which I found to be unusual a day or so after the storm. Usually the branches have been cleared off by the wind after the first day.

Upon our arrival, we found ourselves in a festive house, the music piped throughout the first floor by speakers in several rooms, Carol and Jim busy in the kitchen preparing for the party that night. We jumped in to help before getting dressed and starting the festivities a little after five. Eight hours later, we turned in, drunk and exhausted.

Day 357 of 365

Park between the candy canes

This house is just a few blocks from another Griswoldian effort in the neighborhood. Imagine if they'd been next-door neighbors. The main difference -- other than the 10-foot candy canes flanking the driveway of this house -- is that this house has a speaker on the lawn playing Christmas music, while the other one has a sign telling drivers to tune their radios to 94.1. That's some dedication right there.

Day 356 of 365

6 o'clock in the market

All of the Christmas decorations at Chelsea Market this year were made from recycled plastic (except for the lights, of course), including CDs cut and arranged into wreaths.

Day 355 of 365

Tree rings

I've always been a bigger fan of multi-colored lights than white ones, particularly for photographs, so I changed this one up by going black and white.

Day 354 of 365

Now that's a wreath!

We're getting down to the final days of the year. I took this shot on my way into work to begin my final week of 2009, a lovely, abbreviated three-day week (Sunday-Tuesday). It was my first day in the city after the snowstorm, and while I missed all the whited-out streets and the Times Square snowball fight, I still found some not-usually-seen shots like this.

Day 353 of 365

Winter still life

Winter came down heavily today. Only two days after I heard we might get some snow this weekend, the flakes started falling lightly around 1 p.m. By 8 o'clock, street lights were obscured behind the white curtain and the roads melded with the curbs, the lawns, the sidewalks.

Every hour or so, Casey or I would peek at the view from a window to monitor the progress. No point in shoveling to keep ahead of it, I thought, because all that work would be erased by morning. Besides, I'm happy to give the two neighbors with snow blowers a chance to go an extra few feet to clear our sidewalks, as they've done in winters past without a request.

Winter has arrived in earnest a few days before it arrives on the calendar. The days may soon start getting longer, but spring has never seemed so far away.

Day 352 of 365

Jefferson Market tower

Just to make sure I see as much of the city at Christmas as I can, I took the PATH to 9th St. instead of Christopher as usual and walked up Greenwich Ave. One of the first things that caught my eye at the corner of 6th Ave. and 9th St. was the shooting stars on the lamp posts along the avenue. The Jefferson Market tower made for a rather obvious framing option.

Day 351 of 365

Buy trees here!

Eight days until Christmas and trees are still lining the sidewalks around New York City. I love it.

Day 350 of 365

Tick-Tock Christmas

After closing down Foley's at 4 a.m., I was left with 90 minutes to kill before the first train back to Clifton. Last year, about eight of us went to breakfast at the Tick-Tock Diner on 8th Ave. and 34th St. This year, everyone shuffled home, weary, so I passed a pleasant hour alone in a booth with a book to read, a notebook to jot thoughts and a plate of mozzarella sticks and a Coke all to myself.

Three guys in a booth I faced chatted up the ladies in a booth next to them. The girls -- I deduced they were Duke students who will be studying in Spain next semester -- were cordial enough to the chatty frattys who kept pestering them with questions.

Day 349 of 365

Streaks in the night

On my way into the city for the company Christmas party, I paused on the overpass while waiting for the train to get some tail lights on the road below, with a house decorated for the holidays in the background, of course.

Day 348 of 365

A little color in a black-and-white night

No adjustments made; that's the way it looked atop a West Village apartment building.

Day 347 of 365

Full-on display

I run by this house often and when I noticed the Christmas decorations up, I made a point to go back at night, with my camera. It was raining steadily tonight, so I didn't get out of my car, but you can see the Griswoldian influence on this one.

So much of the lights blink, including the blue ones dangling from the gutters, and "run," as if they're chasing one another. I wonder what the neighbors think. The lights aren't on all night, but I don't know what time they are turned off.

Day 346 of 365

The cookie bake gang

I drove down to my parents' house for the annual cookie bake with my mom's college friends. They've been doing it for more than 30 years, I believe, since they were seniors. It rotates among the houses -- two in New Jersey, one in D.C., one in Connecticut, though the other NJ couple now lives in Boston. When all the kids -- there are five of us from the group -- were living at home in our younger days, we loved this weekend together. Lots of cookies and extra presents.

This is one of the few photos I've taken of myself this year. We first tried the face-recognition timer, but I didn't think to re-read the manual on that feature, so we didn't get it to work right. Alas.

Day 345 of 365

Into a West Village window

This is my favorite window this month on my Greenwich St. walk to work from the Christopher St. PATH station. Just a great New York City Christmas scene.

Day 344 of 365

Happy Holidays to ALL

We always get a kick out of the two-line community events sign at Boro Hall in my hometown of Little Silver. The top line, if it has anything, is usually something topical, such as the current "Happy Holidays." The second line is used to inform residents what can be put out curbside for collection/recycling this week. Yet without punctuation, my family always gets a kick out of reading it literally:

HAPPY HOLIDAYS NEWSPAPERS[,] CARDBOARD [AND] LEAVES[!]

That's how we see it, anyway.

Maybe I'll make this a Christmas card. Might have to go back in the evening, when the tree is lit. I bet there'd be enough light from the street to see the letters on the sign.

Day 343 of 365

Last Christmas at Tavern

I joined Casey on a few "errands" this afternoon. As we set out on a self-made, self-guided pizza tour of New York, we made one quick detour to Tavern on the Green so she could take some measurements of a statue for its listing in the catalog for the upcoming auction of its artifacts. It was only my second visit, I believe. I went there one year during Restaurant Week because a friend had always wanted to eat there and figured that the week of reduced entrees (and reduced options) was the only chance she'd get. There may have been one other brief look-see, but I don't recall for sure.