For the past 2 months I have been using a little iPhone application called Everyday. The app was inspired by photographer Noah Kalina, and I first heard about it after attending a talk by Noah. Noah is best known for taking a picture of himself everyday for the past 11 years. You can see the first 5 years of his project in this YouTube video, which has been viewed almost 20 million times.
When you first start using Everyday there is not much to write home about, but after a while you will start to love it! The premise is simple; take a photo of yourself at regular intervals. Once you have enough, you can make a time-lapse video of your self, creeping towards the grave. I have mine set to prompt me 3 times a day at 9AM, 12PM and 9PM. You can set it to prompt you as much or as little as you want.
One of the problems with a project like this is that you need to get your facial features roughly in the same place for every shot. Everyday has you covered there as it draws a grid on the screen with 2 horizontal lines to align your eyes and month. And another line runs vertically to align the middle of your face. There is also the option to overlay the last image you shot.
You can make the video right in the app although if you have a lot of frames it could take some time. Once the movie is made, you have the option of copying it into your photo library. All the images that are taken are stored in the app itself, so your photo library does not become overloaded with self-portraits. But there is the option of exporting them to the library as well. The movie and saved images have a resolution of 640 pixels by 480 pixels, which is handy for me as that is the width of standard Flickr videos when viewed on a photo page.
You will need an iPhone 4 with a front facing camera to do the self-portrait, although you can use the camera on the back of the phone to shoot other people. There only two features I think are missing from this app. One is the ability to have multiple sets of images so that I could shoot sets of more than one person or scene (why stick to people?). It would also would be nice to have the option to save images in a higher resolution to enable you to make HD movies.
Apart from my two minor grumbles, this app is well worth paying £1.19 ($1.99) for. I look forward to seeing your Everyday movies in a few months. Check it out in the Apple App store.
On the subject of the iPhone apps the app that I use all the time is Instagram I also dropped a review of instagram when that hit the streets to check it out!
I love your video – especially the guest stars in the background 🙂 I’ll probably get this app once I’ve upgraded my iPhone.
Interesting stuff. There’s been some ace stuff with that kind of format over the years – the Noah one – and I’m sure there was some out there of people who had it going way longer – grew beards, shaved, loop until old. I like timelapse. May have to give that a go (hope there’s an android version of the app).
Hello,
I’m the author of Photo Lapse, an app that lets you set a timer and take a picture. It’s more open ended than Photo Lapse and uses front or back camera, and lets you create multiple projects. I’d love any feedback and would gladly send you a promo code.
Favorite version is a 10 minute timer on hikes. Can create some fun video’s!
http://photolapseapp.com/
Brian King
I just got an app similar to this one – Watch Me Change. I like it because you can have multiple users.
Ash
oh – it’s watchmechangeapp.com
Ash
would love to see the everyyear version…
I’ve written a similar app for android, called PhotoChron, which lets you take a photo a day, week or month and build it into a time lapse video. It’s a free download and works on Gingerbread and upwards.