Today’s video of the week comes from TheAlohaRobert on YouTube. Called simply Hawaii Time Lapse in HD, it’s a mesmerizing look at the beautiful Hawaiian landscape. But I was most impressed with the active cloud formations that often travel in different directions in the same scene. It’s proof of the changing winds aloft at different altitudes that pilots try to take advantage of.
Do you have a great travel related suggestion for our Video of the Week? Fill out this form or just include my twitter handle @veryjr in your tweet about it. Maybe we’ll use it as next week’s Video.
In 2005, Eirik Solheim shot a still picture of his back yard in Norway every day for an entire year. He aligned the pictures together and created a beautiful time lapse. Since his 2005 version, he’s managed to do a higher resolution movie in 2008 and finally, during all of last year, he put together time lapse that uses video clips.
Eirik chose the amazing Canon 5D Mark II for this experiment and I think it turned out even better than his still image versions, because he used the HD video function of the 5D Mark II.
Eirik explains the 2009 project:
This time I recorded 30 second video clips each time. My idea was that it would be possible to dissolve between the videos to get the same kind of time lapse effect, but this time with motion all the way. Snow falling, wind blowing etc. 2009 is over and I have now put all the clips I recorded through the year into a couple of videos. I recorded clips with a 15mm fisheye, a 24mm wide angle and a 50mm lens. I’ve made three different versions.
If Eirik shot thirty-second scenes once a week for a year, he likely ended up with 8GB of video per version, for a total of 24GB of footage. He then had to align and process each clip to correct for the fisheye distortion and edited it all together, with some smooth transitions between each scene. Some serious work.
The results really show off the sounds and the sights from the four seasons in Norway. His efforts took a lot of work and they’re well worth the recognition he’s getting. And as if this wasn’t enough, Eirik also provides a tutorial, complete with video on how to do your own time lapse movie on his award winning blog. Give him a digg if you enjoy it.
Seeing as the Leonids meteor shower gave some of us a show earlier this week, it seems fitting to pay homage to the night sky this weekend. I love this photo in particular because it proves that the world still turns and time passes ever so consistently from one second, moment, hour, day, month, year to the next.
This lovely shot entitled “Tunnel View” comes to us from ohad*, who writes, “Shooting into the dark, I decided to shoot a portrait of Yosemite Valley. Half dome in the distance (with airplanes rising) and El Capitan on the left. Shot at 10mm f/3.5 for 601 seconds.” The different lines of movement from the lights of cars that cut through the dark valley to the rising airplane leaving its pink trace toward the heavens and the curving stars really make the world feel alive and allow us to appreciate just how beautiful it really is.
If you have some great travel shots you’d like to share, be sure to upload them to the Gadling pool on Flickr. We might just pick one as our Photo of the Day!
For those of you that aren’t from the United States, and haven’t had a chance to visit yet, it might be hard to visualize just how many Wal-Marts we have.
In 2005, there were roughly 3,800 stores in the United States, which honestly doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize just how big the stores are. To put it into a better prospective, the company employs roughly 1.9-million people — enough to take the #5 spot of U.S. cities with the highest population if it were, you know, a city. Pretty wild stuff. (And what a city that would be!)
Toby over at Kiwitobes.com took Wal-Mart’s location data and created a time lapse video showing the growth rate of the chain around the country. Starting with the first store in Arkansas in 1962, it runs through the years, placing a white dot as a new one opens. To watch the video, click the image above.