Timelapse Shows the Varied, Staggering Beauty of the Dolomites
Landscape photographer Christian Möhrle recently spent a week in the northern reaches of Italy to create a gorgeous timelapse film of the Dolomites that showcases its varied landscape and stunning beauty.
Möhrle, who has previously shared his techniques for color grading his gorgeous landscape photos, tells PetaPixel he recently took a week-long trip to the Dolomites to create this high-resolution timelapse film.
“The Dolomites in northern Italy are by far my most favorite mountains to photograph. The whole area is densely packed with great photo spots and many of them are very well known like the Drei Zinnen, the Seceda or Instagram’s favorite: The Seiser Alm,” he says.
“For me it has been the fourth time here. I wanted to explore some of the more unknown spots as well to show some more diversity and create this timelapse video.”
Möhrle says that he wanted to be very mobile on this trip and rented a camper van so he would be able to quickly reposition to the best places in the region as the conditions appealed to him. While he was able to get to a variety of locations in the week-long trip, it also meant he was rarely near any power sources, which provided him with a challenge.
“I shot this timelapse video on two cameras: The Canon EOS 6D and the Alpha 7 III. Since Sony’s RAW files were huge, I regularly was running into space problems on the SD card. That was the reason for me to use the Canon 6D as my main camera for the time-lapse recording. It still produces high-quality images at much smaller file sizes, plus the dynamic range of the 6D is great so editing wouldn’t be much of a problem! ”
Any motion in his shots was created thanks to the Syrp motion control system, which works with a slider as well as provides pan and tilt motion that he controlled with his smartphone. Syrp was recently rebranded as part of the Manfrotto Move ecosystem.
“To give you an idea on the time spent to create one scene, I tried capturing a photo every second to get smooth motion while aiming for a final frame rate of 30 frames per second,” Möhrle says.
“This means I need 300 images for 10 seconds of video. At one photo a second, I spent five minutes recording a 10-second scene. For scenes with changing light, I wanted to speed things up to be able to see the shadows move, so I took an image every five to 10 seconds. All in all, I shot around 20,000 images, however, a lot of them were not used in the final video.”
The finished video was processed in Lightroom, via LR Timelapse. Möhrle says he usually prefers Adobe Premiere but says that in this case, he was running into strange color problems with the footage, so he used After Effects this time.
For more from Möhrle, make sure to subscribe to his YouTube channel or check him out on Instagram.
Image credits: Christian Möhrl
