The Best Time-Lapse Photography

Many people think time travel is impossible. But with time-lapse photography, this phenomenon feels that little bit closer.

Time-lapse photography fits in perfectly with today’s supposedly busy world where we want to enjoy natural events and special occasions, but want to enjoy them quickly. Here, we’re going to take a look at some of the best time-lapse photography around, so that you can start shooting your own.

Before we go through our favourites, let’s take a quick look at this trending photography technique.

What is time-lapse photography?

Essentially, time-lapse photography is a process that speeds up time in a fixed scene to show the variety of changes over many days, months or even years. This is done by selecting a frame rate on your camera, which will capture the same scene at certain intervals.

How would I do it?

Put simply, you set your camera on a sturdy tripod, aim it at a particular scene (usually with plenty of activity), select a time-lapse interval, and leave for however long you want. After, you then edit this collection of photos to create a short video that shows the scene at a heightened speed — as if everything captured in it was moving quicker than normal through time.

You can even use a slider or dolly to move the camera closer to the scene as it takes its photos to create a moving effect in your final video. Or why not shoot the scene from another angle after you’ve collected your shots? Then, you can edit them together afterwards to show different viewpoints of your sped-up subject.  

Now we’ve gone over the basics of time lapsing, here are some of our favourite, and we think best, time-lapse photography videos.

Blizzard Time-Lapse

This is a great example of time-lapse photography that you can do at home. There’s a fantastic mix of natural, street and car lights in this video, and we think how the snow seems to get thicker and thicker without us really being able to see it fall is a nice effect!

Meteor Shower Time-Lapse

The night sky is always a favourite for time-lapse photographers. It’s something we all see, yet most don’t notice how much it actually moves and changes. This time-lapse video of this year’s Perseid meteor shower is a wonderful display of a high angle shot that manages to capture shooting stars and a changing sky colour. We also like how it’s been edited to include the rotating star-scene before the shower.

Bonfire and Fireworks Time-Lapse

For us, this time-lapse video is all about light: exploding light, speeding light and scattered light. The car headlights at the start look like liquid as they (seem to) speed downhill, which goes nicely with the sudden, repetitive bursts of colours from each firework and the rapidly enlarging/decreasing bonfires.  

Hawaiian Time-Lapse

This video of Hawaii is a perfect example of quality time-lapse editing. Shooting from different angles around the same location lets you edit your shots to create a time-lapse video from various viewpoints. This is a clever way to show how features such as the sea, trees and clouds move at such different speeds within the same frame rate.

Panama Canal Expansion

With images from 2011 to 2016 shown in just two minutes, this five-year time-lapse video has the longest time span in our list. What makes this stand out for us, is how you can see many months of work completed from the ground up in seconds. We especially like the rising water shots and the photographers use of panoramic angles, which really emphasises the scope of the project.

There are thousands of time-lapse videos you can watch online. But why not browse our digital camera range here at DigiBroadcast and start shooting your own instead? The Canon Digital SLR camera is particularly good for time-lapse photography.