Munich in Motion: Timelapse Photography of Germany

Photography Tips  •  Time-lapse Photography

For those of you wondering what timelapse photography is, well, if we put it very simply, it involves shooting a big number of photographs spread over a time period, which are then played back at a much faster pace. Playing them at a pace of 15 to 30 frames per second (fps) results in a motion picture that allows us to see the world in a way we’re not accustomed to. Let’s take, for example, the blossoming of a flower. One would need a great deal of patience to sit and stare at a flower for hours, waiting for it to blossom. And the experience couldn’t exactly be called interesting. But if you take a picture every ten seconds, for the entire blossoming process of let’s say, 2 hours, and then play them at 24 fps, you would compress them all in a much more reasonable time span of 30 seconds. And Voilà! Time travel! Or, close enough, anyway.

Here’s a great example of a time lapse video, by Hungarian photographer Greg Kiss:

According to the author, this video is made out of 25,000 stills, shot with Canon flagship DSLR, the 1DX. All the shots were taken between September 2012 and the first of January 2013, and it took the photographer 150 hours of work for the project to take shape.

For the shooting of the panning scenes, Greg Kiss used a dolly made by Dynamic Perception, along with a Merlin or Emotimo tripod head. According to him this is one of the cheapest combos on the market.

The 360 degrees motion was made possible using a special telescope head, modified for this purpose. The camera was used in manual mode, with a constant high ISO and manual white balance, and for the night/day transitions a neutral density filter was used.