When I bought my new Canon G9 recently, I thought it was kind of cute that it could do time lapse photography, but I didn’t think it was something I’d ever really use. I’ve actually ended up using it quite a bit.
It’s just like shooting video, except it only takes one frame per second. The result is a high-speed video, compressing minutes of reality into a few seconds. It’s almost the opposite of photography - in photography, you’re chopping reality down to a single instant. Here, you’re taking a chunk of time, and compressing it down to not much more than an instant.
Here’s Sam climbing the steps at the bottom of Tiverton park: