Time-Lapse Photography

Most of us have seen some masterful camerawork when it comes to breathtaking time-lapses. Sean White sets a new precedent with this creation by gathering images from a total of 24 countries on all seven continents over the course of six years. The project was funded by Art Wolfe.

Joerg Niggli created this timelapse video of Venice, which shows a day in this gorgeous Italian city, from sunrise to sunset. If you haven't yet traveled to Venice, this video is a cheaper alternative for you, so thank Joerg for saving you some cash! He used a Canon G10 to shoot the timelapses, and for editing he used After Effects and Final Cut Pro X. Enjoy!

At first I thought this was just another time lapse video with a few skating shots mixed in. Then I realized the shots really were mixed. Although the combination isn't present in every shot it's a pretty cool effect to watch. Anyone want to guess how he did it?

If you want to take a peek at a little more of Russell Houghten's work, check out is blog

Videographer/Photographer/Artist Shawn Reeder spent two years in Yosemite creating the footage that would be cut to make this video. Shot mostly under moonlight and with a variety of dollies and cranes, the end result is a masterclass in the art of the outdoor timelapse. It's not often that we get to see such an intimate portrait of a location shot over such a long time period.

Ready to drop your jaw? Richard Kendall doesn't really care if you're ready or not, and he's decided that it's going to drop. This is seriously cool. He took the bullet-camera idea from The Matrix/X-Games (think the whole "40 cameras in a ring shooting simultaneously" thing that we've all seen a hundred times),

This is what it looks like when day and night meet in a single image. Including the prep time, it took photographer Chris Kotsiopoloulos thirty hours to capture the hundreds photos needed to stitch this together. The shot was taken in Sounio, Greece. It got so cold at times that he had to use a hairdryer to keep the lens from fogging up. See the full post for more details!

Here's a breathtaking perspective on the city of Dubai, created by UK filmmaker Richard Bentley. It took him two and a half weeks to capture the footage, shooting one to two sequences a day from various balconies and rooftops. He shot with a Canon 7D, and edited in Avid Media Composer. The final product is fascinating. The only problem I have with this video is that it reminds me that I have yet to see this city in person. That needs to change.

My buddy Paul Mckelvie in the UK just showed me this music video for Benga that he worked on a while back as a runner for the video's directors, Us. The concept is fantastic and the execution turned out great. Once Us had the idea for the video, the next problem was trying to figure out how to actually do it. There was a lot of math homework, calculating the number of records per second against the frame rate. It worked out to be that 960 records would be the equivalent of 1 minute and 20 seconds worth of wave form.

There are some styles of photography which have been beaten into the ground. Take, for example, the trip to an old asylum; it seems like we've all seen a thousand HDR images of the local loony bin. Graffiti-covered walls, derelict operating rooms and spooky wheelchairs ad-nauseum. But every once in awhile, something comes along which makes my jaw drop and revisits what is possible in an ages-old subject. Drew Geraci's Asylum is exactly what I'm talking about.

Here's a great behind-the-scenes time lapse video from photographer Finn O'Hara. It's from a photo shoot he did for the Toronto Maple Leaf hockey team. They set up on the ice and it was an 18-hour production. You'll see the ginormous maple leaf backdrop, measuring 55 ft by 85 ft. Fantastic work from our neighbors to the north!

Let's Colour is a worldwide initiative to transform grey spaces with colourful paint, and the results are quite incredible! This film was shot by Adam Berg over four weeks in Brazil, France, London and India. Every one of these locations has been transformed by a palette consisting of 120 different colours.

Doing video or photo projects for fun and experimenting can lead to some really unique images, and this video by Marc Donahue and Sean M. Williams is a perfect example. While having some fun with a DP Stage Zero Dolly and Canon 5D, they used several different timelapse and stop-motion techniques to achieve a really slick movement and feel to this video.

JESS3 is a creative agency that specializes in data visualization that is based out of Washington DC. They do some pretty awesome stop animation videos and here I have their latest Gmail ad, including a BTS look at how they did what they do so well. Be sure to check JESS3's site for more of their projects and quirky videos. Enjoy!

BTS Video

Photographer Lewis Carlyle at Sun Gallery Photography has been exploring some amazing landscapes and sharing their beauty in his series American Photographic. This video explores Garden of the Gods in Colorado, including info on the challenges of shooting there, as well as a history lesson. What landscape destinations are on your list to visit?

A good timelapse video seems to be popping up every week these days. This week we had 3 amazing timelapses from 3 different artists. Check out the 3 videos below taken in New York City, Yosemite National Park, and Dubai.

Check out this beautifully shot video made by Corey Rich of Lake Tahoe, CA. The video shows off not only the incredible capabilities of the Nikon D4 (be sure to watch it in HD and full screen), but also offers inspiring footage of three athletes in action: Alex Honnold, a free-solo climber, Dane Jackson, kayaker, and Rebecca Rusch, an ultra-endurance athlete.

The ISO sensitivity on today's flagship DSLR cameras is pretty amazing. They are so amazing in fact that for the first time, NASA is able to use Nikon D3 cameras to create night time timelapse videos as the earth sleeps. You've probably seen a bunch of these stunning videos here but now we are able to see who is responsible for capturing the raw images from orbit.

Inspired by Google's street view, Honda Civic is launching their 2012 campaign by creating an interactive 360 degree online experience that will let viewers explore unique environments that have never been seen before. This behind the scenes video is just a peek at what is to come and so far it is pretty awesome.

With only about 2 weeks left in our 2011 Behind The Scenes Contest, entries are starting to pour in. It's great to put some faces with the names of our readers and see the different types of projects everyone is working on. William Walker came up with a pretty simple but clever idea for his contest video.

We first featured film maker and timelapse master Tom Lowe almost 2 years ago. This week he released another mind blowing trailer for his documentary TimeScapes (pre order your copy here). Tom's vision was to give viewers a modern look at the American Midwest in all of its glory, and it to say it's glorious is an understatement!

We've featured a lot of timelapse videos here on Fstoppers. And while they are really cool, very few videos have been made on how you can actually make one yourself. The guys over at Dynamic Perception, makers of the Stage Zero Dolly and MX2 Dolly Engine, have created a pretty thorough explanation of how to program dolly movements with long DSLR exposures.

Timelapse videos have become extremely popular over the last couple years and it seems like everyone is doing them.

Jaren Wilkey is the manager of Brigham Young University's photography department (perhaps he helped on this shoot?). His Behind The Scenes Contest submission idea was to create a photoshoot that played off a news story there at the university. Jaren and his students set out to produce an editorial type image featuring computer hackers.

It seems every week someone is producing a piece of art that pushes the limits of both technology and also creativity. One trend has been to create commercials and videos completely in camera with minimal post processing. The new music video for Kina Grannis completely blows my mind!

I just ran across across Dustin Farrell's newest timelapse and I know I say this a lot but I really think THIS is my favorite so far. Quality timelapse videos keep coming out and raising the bar each time but this is a big leap in my opinion. Obviously these shots have been enhanced in post and I would LOVE to know how he did it.

This video by Trey Ratcliff is a pretty cool idea. Trey traveled across the world in 80 days and documented his adventures with over 8,000 photographs. I hardly ever travel with a camera when I'm on vacation and even if I did, I'm not sure if I could ever force myself to take so many images in the moment. But then again I probably won't ever have anything this cool.

Awhile back we featured a popular video by Jeff Calbom in his Walk Across America commercial. Smithje77 recently traveled from Washington to Maine in 7 days. He was creative enough to take photographs every 90 seconds with his Droid X and piece them together in this fun video.

A couple months back Patrick and I flew up to Chicago to film a BTS of a Gatorade commercial featuring Chaz Ortiz. We have still not completed our BTSV but someone just sent me ANOTHER Gatorade commercial shot at the very same school featuring Chaz Ortiz that has a killer BTSV. The video below was shot in one single take and it will blow your mind.

Part of the appeal of doing something the long way is exactly that: proving you have the guts to reinvent the wheel. When Stephen Doyle was asked to help with the New York Times story What If The Secret To Success Is Failure? he decided to try something that would have been rather easy to produce in post production.

It seems every day someone is creating an interesting timelapse that shows something we've never seen before. This one comes from the International Space Station as it orbits around the earth at night. The video was made from using data from the Gateway To Astronaut Photography Of Earth and stitched together with the open software Virtual Dub.

In the video below Barry JC Purves gives us a really unique look at the creation of a stop motion video. Normally an image is taken, the subject is moved, and then the next image is snapped. In this video Barry took extra images as he was moving the puppet and the results are really incredible.

If you've been shooting stills or video for any length of time, chances are you've often thought about making a product that could make your life a bit easier. Cinetics designer Justin Jensen's own idea was to make a simple dolly system for DSLR cameras that was also portable. He designed and launched his CineSkates on Kickstarter and the response has been huge.

Tom Guilmette is now a pretty regular name on Fstoppers because his BTSVs in the field of video are some of the best we have seen. In the video below Tom travels out west with Eric Kessler to film BTS footage of some of the top timelapse shooters of our time.

If you are planning a behind the scenes video for our 2011 photo contest, you probably also need to setup an interesting interview segment to explain the details of your photoshoot. Most photographers spend a lot of money on their flash equipment but often don't have much in the way of constant lights.

Now I'm not exactly sure what the "largest stop motion animation" actually means but there is no doubt this video is pretty spectacular. You may remember Aardman Productions from our post on the world's smallest stop motion video which is equally as mind blowing. This time they decided to use the beach as their canvas and film the entire animation on a Nokia N8 cell phone.

The guys at T-Recs (short for timelapse recordings) created a timelapse video that is unlike anything I have seen before. We have all seen timelapse videos that have camera movement but nothing like this. Some how these guys are making really big moves, almost like they are shooting out of an airplane. Anyone know how this sort of thing is done?

Believe it or not, the video below was taken with a cell phone. Stu Kennedy from kakepipe.com created a really cool timplase video using his Samsung Galaxy S2 cellphone. After filming the video it was edited using Vegas 10 and the tilt shift look was added using After Effects. This video looks better than what a pretty expensive video camera could have shot 5 years ago...

We have posted a lot of timelapse videos on Fstoppers but very few of them are very informative. In the video below Jay P Morgan takes us through the setup of a quick timelapse video. Jay does a great job of combining a timelapse created from stills and standard video shot at 24fps.

This video was emailed to us and I when I watched it I thought "wow I've never seen anything like this before!" We've all seen rainbows and you've probably had your fair share of experiences taking images of them. What's so interesting about this video is it showcases the elusive "moonbow" formed as moonlight passes through the mist created by waterfalls.

One of the most important things any photographer can do to push their career forward is to take on assignments that are beyond what they feel comfortable shooting. When Todd Rosenberg was approached by Sports Illustrated for a commemorative issue, he was asked to shoot 10 historic cars from the last century of the Indianapolis 500.

Everyone loves a good timelapse video, and Benjamin Sichert has a great one here. Ben filmed this at the NA Otto & Cie factory in Germany which was the first plant to produce 4 stroke combustion engines back in the 1870s. As you can clearly see in the video, this was entirely filmed on a Canon 5D Mark II (video sequences), a Nikon D90 (photo sequences), and the automated Pocket Slider.