"This is a new world in terms of monumental image production," said Doug McCulloh, curator of "Command Z," a digital photography exhibit at the Torrance Museum that features the work of both Kalina and Lee.

"And [the huge image production] is paired with these new tremendous distribution avenues," he said, referring to mega-repository sites like YouTube, Flickr and PhotoBucket. "What's coming out of this is art that has less to do with individual photographs and more to do with devising means of encountering them."

A quick look on YouTube reveals a wide array of homegrown time-lapse projects. One guy made a daylong study of a hot-air balloon race in Reno, another recorded the bloom cycle of an amaryllis flower on his desk, and someone else posted a sped-up computer drawing session that starts as a blank page and ends as a photorealistic image of Radiohead's Thom Yorke.

When John Stone started his daily photo project in early 2003, it wasn't about anything as fancy as art or science. It was about getting ripped. "I was in really bad shape," he explained. "Miserable, smoking a lot of pot, drinking heavily — it was just rock bottom." So Stone did what any normal person would — he began an extremely rigorous diet and weight training regimen and documented his progress with photos.

In the time-lapse movie on his site, Stone begins as a pale, flabby computer geek who looks like he hasn't gotten off the couch for months. But as the days progress, his pot belly shrinks, and his arms, shoulders and chest seem to tighten and resolve. After six months, he's lean, tan and hardly nerdy at all. But Stone kept going, spending years honing his diet and lifting technique, and keeping it all on film. As of his portrait of April 1, (he takes them only once a month now), Stone looks like the buff dude on the cover of Men's Fitness.

Why are "during" photos so much more compelling than old-fashioned before and afters? Easy, Stone said. "It drives home the point that everybody can do it. It's not just some magic pill."

Maybe so, but beware. This is the seductive illusion of time-lapse. Start to believe the string of widely spaced moments is somehow continuous, and you're liable to forget that life is all the heavy lifting that happens in between.

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