Time-lapse photographer Randy Halverson spent three months hunting thunderstorms at night in central South Dakota using a Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 60D, and Canon T2i. Capturing both the storms and the Milky Way in the same shots proved to be a difficult task:
One of the challenges in making this video, was trying to get good storm and star shots. The opportunity doesn’t come along very often, the storm has to be moving the right speed and the lightning can overexpose the long exposures. I had several opportunities this summer to get storm and star shots. In one instance, within a minute of picking up the camera and dolly, 70mph winds hit. One storm was perfect, it came straight towards the setup, then died right before it reached it. [#]
In the end, he captured enough photographs to create this 3-minute-long time-lapse video showing the galaxy floating overhead while storm clouds roll in. Lightning photos are one thing, but seeing storms sweep across the scene at night is incredible.
What happens when 3 guys spend 44 days flying 38,000 miles on 18 flights to 11 different countries, capturing moments of footage at each location with two cameras? Check out this epic short film based on the concept of “movement” and you’ll see!
This epic advertisement for The Camera Store imagines what would be like if wars were fought with cameras instead of guns. In this alternate reality, massive telephoto lenses and flash(bang)s sure come in handy!
Derick Childress spent three nights shooting a massive light painting photograph with the message “Emily, will you marry me?” drawn out on the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina as a proposal to his girlfriend Emily Kern. The final image was made up of about 800 individual stills that each took 10 seconds to expose.
Being a photographer for the National Geographic opens the door to all kinds of photo opportunities that other photographers would die for. For a Nat Geo story on “The Power of Light”, photographer (and now blogger) Joe McNally climbed to the very tip of the Empire State Building to capture a stunning wide angle photograph of the antenna light bulb being changed. Luckily for the rest of us, they also created an awesome behind-the-scenes video giving us a glimpse into how the photo was made.
We’ve featured the amazing time-lapse work of Tom Lowe here before (see here and here), but here’s another sneak peek at his upcoming debut film titled “TimeScapes” that will drop your jaws. Stunningly beautiful.
Wanting to capture a nighttime panoramic photograph of Toledo, Spain in which darker areas were illuminated, the Photographic Association of Toledo decided to eschew HDR and attempt something new — light-painting on an epic scale. They enlisted the help of 50 association photographers who strolled around the city firing off their flashes multiple times per minute. The resulting photograph was illuminated by over 3000 flashes covering 100K square meters. Wowzers!
This Spanish blog has a detailed account of how the photograph was made, though you’ll have to have it machine-translated if you can’t read Spanish.
If you live in an urban area, you probably don’t see the night sky very clearly due to light pollution. Luckily, there’s videos like this one to remind us how beautiful the sky above is when there aren’t artificial lights drowning out the stars. This is a high-definition time-lapse of the Milky Way floating across the sky.
Warning: this might inspire you to learn more about time-lapse and astrophotography.
Vimeo user ph dee went out to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park last night after hearing that it’s a great place to watch meteor showers. After spending four hours shooting frames for a Perseid meteor shower timelapse video, he discovered that the heavy air traffic in the area dominated the scene.
Luckily for us, he still went ahead and created the video, publishing it to his Vimeo stream with the title “Perseid Meteor Shower Failure“. Even though you don’t get to see much of the Perseid meteor shower, the video offers a breathtaking view of the Earth rotating and airplanes shooting across the sky. Meteor shower fail. Timelapse win.
The first part of the video was captured with a Canon 20D and intervalometer, while the second part was shot with a Canon 5D Mark 2 and Sigma 20mm f/1.8 at f/2 and 30 second exposures on continuous shooting mode with the shutter depressed.
Lori Nix is a photographer that works with miniatures and models for surreal scenes and landscapes. Her work reminds us of the photographs by Matthew Albanese that we featured a while back. Her project “The City” depicts eerie abandoned buildings in an apocalyptic world:
