1,000 Hours and 300,000 Photos Went Into This Timelapse of Europe

Photographer Paul Richardson of Manchester, UK, just released a time-lapse short film that’s garnering high praise on the Web. It’s titled “Patience,” and is a 4K journey around Europe that took a great deal of patience to create.

“After over two years of shooting timelapse professionally, I decided it was time to create a video highlight my favourite work to-date,” Richardson writes. The variety from job to job still surprises me, everything from football matches to year long construction projects.”

“This video showcases the results of many sleepless nights, hundreds of thousands of photos, and countless hours shooting,” he continues. For example, the Milky Way shot at 1m23s took 4 nights of staying up and driving around for a sequence of 50 photos.

Richarson estimates that the video contains over 1,000 hours of shooting with his Canon 6D, 7D, and 5D Mark III DSLRs. Over 300,000 still frames were created for the 2-minute video, so every second of footage is about 7 hours of photography.

“Shooting timelapse requires a lot of patience and forward thinking,” says Richardson. “Some shots took multiple attempts to get the right light, others required whole days just to capture a few seconds of footage.”

“There’s a careful balance of trying to predict the future, and just being determined enough to do everything it takes to get the shot.”