time-lapse

Star trails and pink auroras abound in Sunchase Pictures' time-lapse "Death Valley Dreamlapse 2."

DL Cade of Peta Pixel writes: A high-quality time-lapse is a beautiful thing. From the aurora borealis over Norway to the thriving metropolis that is San Diego, we’ve featured many a gorgeous photographic fast-forward through time, each of them put together by photographers that knew how to pull the most out of the time-lapse medium.

From Norwegian landscape photographer, Ole Salomonsen, comes his third short-film about the northern lights. This year some epic displays has been on the sky, and for the first time he has included real-time recordings.

The video is shot using stills and assembled together for best possible resolution and dynamic range. In this video however, for the first time, he includes some real-time video footage. "This is to better show how furiously fast and beautiful the polar spirits can dance!" says Salomonsen. 

Preston Kanak gives a walkthrough of his workflow for shooting a successful timelapse. He writes, "Shooting a timelapse is not a science. However, there are a few things you can do to improve your chances. One of the challenges you need to overcome when shooting is determining the ideal setting for your camera. In this post, I will walk you through a few of the settings you will need to consider."

Read his full post here on Philip Bloom's site.

This time-lapse from Marsel Van Oosten and editor Daniella Sibbing captures not just beautiful natural phenomena, but a very rare occurence to behold. As they explain on their Vimeo page, "We used small headlights for selectively lighting trees and rocks, and we sometimes used the moon. The brighter the scene, the more moon there was at the time. For the arch scene we timed our shoot exactly with moonset, which involved quite a bit of calculating and planning. But the hardest one of all was probably the mist scene in Deadvlei. Mist in Deadvlei only occurs around five times a year, so we had to keep a close eye on the weather predictions and many attempts were unsuccessful. When we finally got it right, the results far exceeded our expectations and show Deadvlei as no one has ever seen it before."

Jess Dunlap shot for over a year in locations ranging from Yosemite and Lake Tahoe to Convict Lake, June Lake and Simi Valley to create the four minute time-lapse spectacle "Monolation." The video is comprised of over 17,000 photographs and set to a slow-building symphonic piece called "The Haunted Ocean" by Max Richter.

Watch below.

Filmmaker Forrest Pound gives step-by-step instructions on how to create a DIY camera box for long-term time-lapses, which he used to film the ecological system in the Colorado River basin.

He says of his work, "I’m definitely drawn to illuminating the aesthetic elements of scientific projects- for example, I’d still love to see how the forest floor changes over the course of a season… But, even the best shot ideas need to be incorporated into a powerful story to make an impact. And that’s what I’m all about now; I want to foster meaningful and lasting change through film while pushing the artistic and technical bounds of my craft."

Read more here on Fstoppers.

Dustin Farrell releases the final chapter of his time-lapse trilogy Landscapes with "Landscapes: Volume 3." He writes on his Vimeo page, "I hope you have enjoyed my work on this series over the last three years. It has been an amazing ride full of amazing experiences. I plan to continue shooting landscapes timelapses but putting together videos of this magnitude will be difficult to continue on a regular basis. The good news is that from all of this photography a new website was born. www.stockvideovault.com is our brand new website where my new work will be shown on a regular basis."

Watch the stunning video below.

Timelapse.org picks their four favorite time-lapses of 2012, with work from Keith Loutit, Kristian Ulrich Larsen and Olafur Haraldsson, Lance Page, and Paolo A. Santos. Watch them below.

Filmmaker Giacomo Sardelli created this space time-lapse using not only images taking from the International Space System, but also audio messages of peace and harmony from the astronauts who have lived there over the past 11 years.

Sardelli explains, "Pictures were downloaded from the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center and edited with Photoshop CS6. Even if they were Hi-res images shot with Nikon D3S cameras, a lot of noise removal and color correction was needed, especially for those shots at ISO 3200, which was the highest ISO speed limit I’ve allowed myself to use, exception made for the last sequence of the spinning world, which comes from a sequenze of shots taken at ISO 12800. Daytime shots were taken at ISO 200. I’ve used Topaz Denoise 5 for noise removal, as it is very powerful and accurate when dealing with shadows and blacks."

A tree takes centerstage, literally, in the simple music video for Yo La Tengo's "Ohm." The time-lapse video was shot by Josiah Marshall and Chris Cantino. Watch below.

Filmmakers Kevin Parry and Andrea Nesbitt of Candy Glass Productions give a how-to on creating a spinning time-lapse with a landmark building in the center. Use a combination of Google maps, carefully planned shots, and Photoshop to make your own after checking out the tutorial below.

This 30-second time-lapse from photographer Mark Kochte covers two and a half hours of the night sky over West Virginia during last week's Geminid Meteor Shower. Writes Kochte, "There are no less than 30 Geminid meteors captured 'on film.' As well as three planes, a satellite, and a sporadic meteor (which you may or may not notice at 0:19 amongst the tree branches at the far lower right of the video; if you do note it, it'll be angled in a different direction than all the other meteors, which means it is not associated with the Geminid shower). The planes are pretty easy to pick out, they are streaks that travel across the sky. The satellite appears between 0:26 and 0:27 just to the left of the branches at the far right side of the screen and briefly travels diagonally up right before vanishing again."

DP Tom Guilmette is on assignment at the summit of New Hampshire's Mount Washington where the temperature is 6 degrees F and the windchill is -25 at 60 miles per hour sustained. He's figured out how to capture time-lapses at those extreme temperatures and he's sharing that knowledge on his blog.

He writes, "I am using a bunch of gear that I built just for this extreme environment. Over the last few weeks, I have been racking my brain and making trips to Walmart and Home Depot. I tested stuff in my freezer at home! At the time of this blog, I have shot four time lapses up on the summit with 100 percent success in ridiculous weather. The custom heated camera enclosures I designed and built for less than $100 each are actually working. Go figure!"

Read his full post here.

Time-lapse photographer Colin Rich talks to ICG Magazine about the dedication and resourcefulness that went into shooting his viral video, "NightFall."

Says Rich, "“A lot of people don’t understand the challenges. On most sets, the mentality is to set an interval and walk away. But a good time-lapse, one that really lends to the overall tone or storyline, is much more involved.”

Read the full piece here.

Photographer Jamie Scott went to the same 15 spots in Central Park twice a week for six months to create this beautiful (and labor-intensive) time-lapse showing the glory that is fall in New York. He shot everything just after sunrise using his recorded notes on camera positions for consistency. Watch below. (via PetaPixel)

Violent sun storms are the cause of the gorgeous auroae caught in Nicholas Buer's time-lapse film, "Spirits," shot mainly over northern Norway.

Explains Slate's Bad Astronomy, "Auroae are the result of subatomic particles from the Sun—protons and electrons—captured by the Earth’s magnetic field, and then channeled down into our atmosphere. At a height of about 100 kilometers (60 miles) above the ground, these particles slam into the atoms and molecules in our air, causing them to glow. The colors tell you which atom is which: green and red are from oxygen (usually, that is; sometimes nitrogen can glow red as well but it’s much weaker), while blue is nitrogen. These colors can even sometimes merge to form purple and pink aurorae! It’s quantum mechanics, and it’s gorgeous."

Photographer Stephane Vetter caught the Leonid meteor shower with his Nikon D3 and Sigma 8mm fisheye lens. Watch the incredible time-lapse of the night sky below. (via Huffington Post)

Here's time-lapse done a little differently: through a fisheye lense. Photographer Stephane Vetter was able to create a view of the entire night sky using a Nikon D3 and a Sigma 8mm fisheye lens. Watch below. (via PetaPixel)

Christoph Malin shot this otherworldly time-lapse from the volcanic island of La Palma, one of the Canary Islands. Writes Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy, "Some things to look out for in the video are the Milky Way—the galaxy in which we live—rising majestically into the sky, the combined light of billions of stars forming a flat line and bulging central core. I never get tired of seeing that! Also, at about 4:10 you can see clouds rolling over a ridge like a wave that never quite crashes, and then a few seconds later a distant lightning storm flashing. In fact, as gorgeous as the sky is, I think perhaps the terrestrial weather steals this video; the shots of clouds lit from below by the city lights and streaming like a dream across the frame are simply wonderful."

The time lapse footage in the documentary Chasing Ice manages to capture quite dramatically large-scale environmental transformation in some of the most remote regions of the world. Through time lapse recordings, the film compresses years into seconds and shows ancient mountains of glacial ice in motion as they disappear. As the debate about climate change polarizes America and the intensity of natural disasters ramps up globally, Chasing Ice depicts a photojournalist on a mission.

Time-lapse photographer Randy Halverson lends his talents into making the slow-building 15-minute music video for BT's "13 Angels on my Broken Windowsill." Says BT on the collaboration, "I’m always searching for people doing innovative things in other mediums, particularly visual art, to try and create a visual metaphor for what is happening sonically and musically.