Lift Bridge Time-Lapse (Part 2: Fun with Photo Slicing)

The Portage Lake lift bridge sunset, together in a single photo
Here's my next bit of fun with time-lapse photography: putting it all together in one photo! This photo is made up of 36 vertical slices. Reading from left to right, they span approximately 1.5 hours centered around sunset -- from 8:30 until 10:00 pm. These are the same images that went into my time lapse video of the lift bridge. The sharp edges are a bit annoying, but that could be solved by taking even more photos (something I hope to do shortly).

For those interested -- how did I do this? I can certainly tell you how I didn't do this: I definitely did not slice and assemble 36 photos by hand! Instead, starting with my 36 image files, I used magic -- actually, ImageMagick -- to do this for me. First, I ran the following shell script:

#!/bin/bash
off=$[0]
for ((i=2861;i<=2896;i++)) do
   convert -crop 107x2385!+$off+0 DSC_$i.jpg Crop_$i.jpg;
   off=$[$off + 107];
done

This script runs through the images, which were named DSC_2861.jpg through DSC_2896.jpg, in order. For each of them, it uses ImageMagick's convert command to crop the image into a single slice, 107 pixels wide and 2385 pixels tall. Each slice is 107 pixels to the right of the previous image's slice, so that the slices would all line up. I came up with these numbers pretty simply: 107 is the width of my images, divided by 36, while 2385 is the height of my images. After that, all I had to do was

convert Crop*.jpg +append bridge.jpg

which stitches the images together horizontally into a single image. (That's what +append does. Using -append stacks them vertically, in case you wanted to do a vertical time-lapse photo.)