Around The World Time-lapse Journey

Photography Tips  •  Time-lapse Photography

Quitting your job to travel the world is, in itself, a daunting task. Quitting your job to travel the world to take over 25,000 photographs is quite another. Yet, Kien Lam, did just that. Lam managed to sort through all the photographs and condense them down to a moving five minute time lapse video of his journey around the world. What sets Lam’s time lapse apart from others is the equipment he used. He didn’t tote around a pricey DSLR and dolly. The only camera equipment Lam brought with him was the compact Lumix GF-1 and a flimsy, off-brand tripod.  Check the video out here:

Lam used two lenses during production, a 20mm f/1.7 and 14-45mm f/3.5-4.5. He credits the success of his time-lapse to the lightweight camera.

“I don’t think I would have shot as often and gotten as many scenes if I had to carry around a backpack with my DSLR and a big enough tripod to support it,” Lam said. No dolly was used, as pans were created in post. Lam manually triggered the shutter speed at intervals ranging “anywhere between a few seconds to a minute in between shots. This meant I might have captured 3 minutes of time flow and sometimes up to an hour.”

For post production, Lam edited the photographs, added effects, and created the time lapse using Adobe Lightroom, Adobe After Effects and Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Lam took over 25,000 frames on his trek through 17 different countries, 10,000 of those being time lapse footage. Of those 10,000, Lam selected 6237 of them to create this work of art.

For Further Training on Time-lapse Photography:

Check out this new COMPLETE guide (146 pages) to shooting, processing and rendering time-lapses using a dslr camera. It can be found here: Time-lapse Photography Guide