U.S. Election Have You Down? Watch This 10K Panoramic Time-Lapse of L.A. Instead

What do you get when you combine over two years of shooting, extensive location-scouting, two Canon 5D Mark III cameras, and a very ambitious time-lapse photographer? You get just over six minutes of breathtaking panoramic time-lapse footage coming in at a remarkable 10K by 4K resolution. If this amazing time-lapse video from Photographer Joe Capra doesn't take your mind off of the election for a few minutes, nothing will.

The noteworthy footage was shot over a two-year period throughout the city of Los Angeles, California. Shot in true panoramic form using two synced cameras side-by-side, stitching the resulting panoramic time-lapse footage together creates stunning 10K by 4K resolution.

Capra, a Los Angeles, California-based photographer, created a huge list of potential locations that he and his team wanted to shoot for this project. For every location on the list, he would first visit in person to see if he could actually get the shot he was looking for. On several occasions, he would have a specific shot in mind and then get to the location only to find there was no way to capture it or that the shot did not really work well as a panorama. 

Nothing about shooting this project was simple (or inexpensive). He needed two identical cameras (Canon 5D Mark III) with the exact same settings, identical lenses (Canon 24-70mm, 24-105mm, and 70-200mm), and the cameras needed to be in sync and maintain sync throughout the shots. On many of the shots, Joe states that he had to manually ramp exposure to go from day to night.

This is tricky just on one camera; imaging trying to deal with two and keeping all settings in sync.

Post-processing proved to be very time-consuming and labor-intensive, he admits, going on to mention that he shot a total of 16 TB of data, which of course required an additional 16 TB for backups.

As with photography in general, it is all about timing, weather, and light, so Joe and his team had to make multiple visits to all the locations to get compelling shots. Often, shots would fail, so the team would have to re-shoot. Joe says that once he captured what he wanted, he would then head back to the office and start the post-production and processing for each session, which he admits took the most amount of time. 

For more from Capra, visit his website and Facebook.

Images provided with permission from Joe Capra.