Kempner: How to build a highrise in 30 seconds. (Watch)

Watch time-lapse images of an Atlanta high-rise being built in seconds and try to keep your jaw from dropping. Giant structures sprout like flowers, as if they’re living things growing zip-a-dee-doo-dah fast.

The scale of your view changes. Trucks are the size of ants. Construction workers are like feverish glimpses of fleas.

Metro Atlanta's landscape often changes in a blur. But in the world of one Atlanta-based company it changes even faster.

OxBlue makes money capturing the evolution of everything from the new State Farm building in Dunwoody to the 14th Street bridge over the Downtown Connector, the International Terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and build-outs in Sephora stores nationwide.

The company was founded 15 years ago by two guys (Chandler McCormack and Bryan Mattern) with backgrounds in construction and tech. They and their team of more than 60 employees have outfitted more than 10,000 construction projects around the world with remotely-linked cameras designed to automatically take high-resolution photos with mind-numbing regularity. Every 10 minutes. Twenty-four hours a day. For the life of the project.

The systems are set up to document work-site progress. For a fee of about $900 a month, contractors, owners, architects and others don’t have to make as many site inspections because they can log in to look at the images online from anywhere to make sure things are going as planned.

Has that load of beams arrived on time? Are safety railings set up on the roof like they’re supposed to be? Is that wall being built on the spot shown in the revised plans or the original one?

An endless quest

It’s another wrinkle in the endless quest for data and efficiency.

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” McCormack, OxBlue’s CEO, told me.

“The idea that you design something and that’s the way it’s built is not the way it really happens. Plans change.”

The system, with cameras posted on poles or nearby buildings, is supposed to help bosses and monitors prevent costs and schedules from blowing up. McCormack told me about one of the earliest projects. While on vacation in Charleston, he logged in to checkout progress on a Kroger in Atlanta that he was involved in engineering. Workers were pouring a long line of curb and gutter in the wrong location. Soon they’d be compounding the mistake by pouring asphalt. He said he called in and they fixed the problem before it cost more time and tens of thousands of dollars.

But I wondered: Are these eyes in the sky being used by bosses to spy on workers and figure out who’s slacking off?

McCormack told me he hasn’t heard of his customers doing that. The cameras are good at showing the big picture, he said, not the faces of people at the scene.

Over the awe

We spoke for a while. But he didn’t really seem awed by how cool the footage is that companies like OxBlue produce. I guess he’s seen enough high rises bloom in seconds.

I'm still amazed by this stuff, though. So I called Doug Urquhart, who specializes in time-lapse photography and co-owns Atlanta-based Upthink Lab, which does production and post-production work for commercials and the like.

Urquhart calls it “manipulating time.”

He worked on a production for a major retailer about stain-proof carpet. He created time-lapse images of an artist using mushed-up food and drinks to paint on a carpet, then showed the clean up. For another about waterproof flooring, he showed ice sculpted to look like furniture, which then melted over time and was left as water pooled on the floor before it was dried.

For personal projects, he backpacks into places like the wilds of the Canadian Rockies, carting along solar-powered cameras and packs of hand warmers with rubber bands that he uses to keep lenses warm enough to prevent fog and dew when left out over night.

“People connect with almost all time-lapse photography because you are able to see in a way that you can’t traditionally see with the naked eye.”