Timelapse Photographer Takes Us Aboard a Container Ship

Photography Tips  •  Time-lapse Photography

Have you ever wondered how international trade really works? Not in the abstract sense of government policies and tariffs, but how things really, physically, get from point A to point B? In comes this mesmerizing timelapse, spanning a day in the life of a shipping freight:

This comes from Toby Smith, who’s made something of a name for himself shooting international industry—sapphire mines in Madagascar, Scottish hydroelectricity. Here, he’s rigged his camera atop the Gunhilde Maersk, en route from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, to Ningbo, China, snapping more than 78,000 5D Mark III RAW files along the way. The video spans from dawn…

…till noon…

…and then to dusk.

While Smith has been deliberately mum on how he made the video, the video was shot with a Canon TS-E 17mm tilt-shift lens mounted in a custom-built, solar-powered marine casing. The video is raw footage—completely silent, and more than seven minutes long—but a nonetheless hypnotic look at an unseen world.