Want to see a tree grow up before your very eyes? Sonoma County, California resident YouTube user Lapeere created this neat video that squeezes five years in the life of his backyard tree into a one-minute-long time-lapse video.
Read more…

You’ve probably seen gigapixel photos and timelapse videos before, but how about a fusion of the two? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have a project called GigaPan Time Machine that features gigapixel time-lapse videos of things ranging from plants growing to a university carnival. They also set up a wiki describing how you can create your own time-lapse using a GigaPan Pro.

GigaPan Time Machine (via Engadget)

This creative time-lapse video (a commercial for Volvo) shows a beautiful outdoor scene transform from one season to another through time-lapse photography. If computer trickery wasn’t involved in the creation, then this video must have required a whole lot of patience and hard work.

Thanks for the tip, Joakim!

The winter hasn’t been friendly this year to certain areas of the US, with flash floods hitting Southern California and blizzards tormenting the East Coast. Vimeo user Michael Black decided to document a blizzard by setting up a Canon DSLR with a remote timer, snapping a photograph every five minutes. He combined the resulting photographs into a time-lapse video that shows 20 hours of intense snowfall in 40 seconds. Boy does that snow get high.

While adding movement to time-lapse videos is cool, the special equipment (e.g. dollies, cranes, etc…) you need can be pricey. Derek Mellott couldn’t afford to shell out hundreds of bucks for a dolly, so he decided to make his own using things found in his garage. His resulting setup included tripods, a cable management tray, a TI-calculator as an intervalometer, and a BBQ rotisserie motor to slowly pull the camera along.
Read more…

A couple days ago we featured a compilation of stunning time lapse clips shot in the desert by Mike Flores. The video above is a change in scenery, but epic nonetheless. Photographer Simon Christen shot the various clips using a Canon 40D (10-22mm, 24-70mm, and 70-200mm) around the San Francisco Bay Area over the course of a year. His camera was always in manual mode, and he adjusted the settings as the light changed due to things like fog and clouds.

Here’s another video we posted a while ago that gives you a beautiful glimpse at what San Francisco is like.

This is a stunning montage of timelapse clips created by Mike Flores during the past year. Many of the scenes are layered beautifully, with the desert in the foreground, clouds whizzing across the sky, and the universe spinning brightly in the background.

Shots in which the camera moves were created using two custom track and dolly systems that Flores created using off-the-shelf parts. The photographs were made with a Canon 5D Mark II with three lenses: the 16-35mm f2.8 II, 14mm f2.8 II, and 24mm f1.4 II. The music in the background is from the movie Inception.

Here’s a stunning time-lapse video by Dan Eckert shot in the California and Arizona deserts. Aside from the fact that seeing the night sky spin in time-lapse is usually pretty darn cool, Eckert employs some interesting techniques that we haven’t come across before.

For example, in one shot Eckert paced across the desert, aiming at a particular mountain in the horizon and snapping a single photograph every time he took a step. If you have a few minutes, this’ll definitely make for a relaxing and awe-inspiring break.

Tom Lowe of Timescapes creates amazing time-lapse videos that we’ve featured here before, so it was interesting to come across the above behind-the-scenes video showing how he uses an experimental crane Kessler Cranes created. The video shows the crane in action, and then the footage from the camera mounted on the crane.

Who knew a 40-second-long behind-the-scenes video could be so epic?

(via f stoppers)

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.