Time lapse shows construction of poinsettia tree at the Mall in Columbia

20 photos

On Thursday, November 15, workers set up the annual tradition of the large poinsettia tree at The Mall in Columbia. They used about 1,000 plants — mostly red, but a few white — and took more than 14 hours to complete the tree of poinsettias.

Work began just after 6:30 a.m., scaling the metal tree structure and attached with harnesses to keep them from falling. They slowly (slowly… slowly…) made their way down, level by level.

I spent about four 90-minute spans of time at the mall: 6:15 – 7:45 a.m., 10:15 – 11:45 a.m., 2 – 3:30 p.m. and 6:30 – 8 p.m. Setting up my camera on a tripod, I configured it to shoot one frame every 10 seconds. The completed time lapse included more than 1,600 images, each lasting for 2 frames of a 30-frame-per-second sequence. Each second of the time lapse, then, had 15 images.

Flip through the photos to see a cross section of the total, and watch the video below to see the whole thing.