In the spring of 2009, Andrew Lundquist and his wife Renee made the decision to “leave it all behind” and hit the road with their five kids. The former computer programmer and his family now come and go as they please, moving from town to town, state to state, enjoying all the freedoms the open road has to offer.

“I'm an avid outdoorsman. I love exploring nature and even urban environments, and videography became my excuse to explore the world,” he remarks by phone from his current stopover in Colorado. “I noticed the tremendous growth in the stock photo industry over the past few years, and as I started looking into the footage side of things, it seemed poised for a similar explosion.”

	Photo Andrew Lundquist/Shutterstock

Lundquist's preferred niche is time-lapse photography and videography. “If I was going to distinguish myself I'd have to do something that not everyone else is doing.” His interests represent a synthesis of his nature and technology. For every sunset, leaf storm or cloud formation, he exhibits equally thoughful attention to the formation of refuse from a paper shredder, or a close-up tracking shot of a circuit board. “Given that I also happen to be the father to five children, it may not come as a surprise that I enjoy shooting scenes depicting family lifestyles and children as well,” he writes in a blog post on the Shutterstock Web site.

One of his first experiments with time lapse is also one of his most successful. Using his Nikon D300's intervalometer setting, Lundquist captured a busy Washington, D.C., subway station with trains whipping past, loading and unloading their passengers. Keeping a low profile was a concern, considering the Metro's heightened security measures, but Lundquist had shot photographs in the subway before, so he knew his exposure ahead of time and used a backpack in lieu of a tripod. “I just set the camera down, pulled out a book, and 40 minutes later I had a 15-second clip,” he says.

To capture the construction of an office building, Lundquist would stop by the site each day, putting his feet in exactly the same spot on the sidewalk. “Pedestrians rushed past, annoyed that I was standing in their way. I aligned the verticals with the correct gridlines in my viewfinder. I tightened the grid, captured the shot, and finally relaxed knowing that I was 1/30th of a second closer to the [completion] of a time-consuming experiment,” he writes in the blog.

He continues, “For every frame I captured, I would spend up to an hour or more editing. I cloned out any ads that crept in and matched the sky, white balance, shadows and lighting as closely as possible. It was important to align each shot manually with the frame that came before it in the sequence.”

Staying mobile supplies Lundquist with an endless source of subjects. While he acknowledges that he could never exhaust all of his options by staying in one place, “I'm always looking for new visual stimulation,” he says. “I'm inspired by the unexpected.”

Jon Oringer, founder and CEO of Shutterstock, adds, "We are seeing a strong demand for time-lapse clips at Shutterstock Footage as television, film and video producers look for ways to show the passing of time in an affordable and compelling way. Buying time-lapse stock footage from us enables producers to save the valuable time and money required to shoot this genre."