Epic Time Lapse Video of Manhattan in Spring

At this point you probably know that I am a sucker for a well-made time lapse video. The last one I posted to my blog has been viewed through StumbleUpon over 4,800 13,000+ times. Visitors to my site viewed it over 10,000 17,000 times in a single month!

So hats off to my cousin, photographer and Mizzou student, Ben Walton, who tweeted this today.

I recently spent a little over a month hotel hopping in Manhattan (March 12th to April 29th) shooting time lapse. These clips were pulled from over an hours worth of footage.

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And so now I’m kicking myself. I lived in hotels in San Francisco for 5 months and this concept never even popped into my head. Marketing hotels by taking shots of their beautiful interiors, yes. Taking advantage of their mind-blowing views as time lapse video? No.

This is genius and beautiful. I suppose it isn’t too late to do it here in San Francisco. Would be interesting the compare the landscape and cityscapes captured from these two coastal cities. So similar and yet so different.

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The Most Amazing Time-lapse Video

This has got to be the most amazing time-lapse video I have ever seen. Not just because of the beautiful landscapes the camera is capturing but the way it is captured. Hats off to the guys at T-Recs.

Down below I’ll just guessing here on how the hell they did it. Meanwhile, take a look and share your theories in the comments. I’m thinking a little HDR magic is going on too.

So the sky shots must have been done on some sort of tower or a weather balloon with a stabilization and constellation tracking system. That’s pretty much the only thing that I can think of capable of making those shots so steady and so stunning.

The city shots have to have been done with a huge rolling crane on a track. Some of the shots are pretty basic but others change on both an X and Y plane. Tricky stuff! Especially in the middle of a city.

Finally, polarizing lenses to help make the sky dramatic and obviously a little HDR going on here. HDR = High Dynamic Range photography. They might be shooting with an awesome sensor in raw (Nikon D3X/S, Canon 5DMKII or maybe even a Red sensor) and composing a tone mapped image by post processing three exposures from a single shot. Alternately they could be shooting three or more shots right after the other and doing a standard tone map.

Either way, it’s the first time that I’ve seen HDR video look good and certainly the first time I’ve seen an HDR time-lapse video this awesome. I cannot wait to go through their other works.

Do you agree with me or am I way off base? Continue reading