Watch Las Vegas grow over 40 years

by Mike Barish on

Las Vegas wasn’t always as sprawling as it is today. Modern Las Vegas extends far beyond the Strip. It wasn’t all that long ago, however, that Sin City was just a tiny speck on the map. As more Americans – and international travelers, for that matter – discovered Las Vegas and began turning it into a premiere vacation destination, development projects boomed and investments in this urban oasis exploded. Thanks to this time-lapse of NASA satellite images, we can try to wrap our minds around just how far Las Vegas has come since 1972, and how it has grown exponentially over the decades.

What do the next 40 years have in store for Las Vegas? Hopefully an end to that “Whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” slogan.

Video of the Day: Two days in Zion National Park

by Mike Barish on

Zion National Park in Utah is one of those places that exceeds expectations and defies explanation. I might just be partial to it because I’m getting married there in June, but it truly is an awe-inspiring place. Red rocks line steep canyons and wild flowers dot the horizon. It’s difficult to imagine what early settlers of the West must have thought when they came across Zion. This video shows two days in the life of Zion in January of this year. The whole video is gorgeous, but the trip through the Zion-Mount Carmel Tunnel is a highlight for sure.

Video: cosmic time-lapse, ‘Temporal Distortion’

by Elizabeth Seward on

“Temporal Distortion” from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.

If you’re in the mood for taking a beautiful, cosmic, time-lapse break, consider this your opportunity. The gorgeous time-lapse images that make up this short film (which is part of a 23 minute expanded version) feature the Milky Way, Aurora, and plenty of other Earthly delights. An original score by renowned composer Bear McCreary accompanies this piece. McCreary has scored “Battlestar Galactica” and “The Walking Dead,” among others. We’ve featured other time-lapse work from Randy Halverson. If you like this video, be sure to check out his Milky Way time-lapse as well as his South Dakota winter time-lapse.

Video of the Day: Tilt-shift Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro

by Mike Barish on

Carnaval (or, as we like to write it, Carnival) was last week, but we’re just not done celebrating here at Gadling HQ. This video is from Carnaval 2011 in Rio de Janeiro, but we can’t stop watching it. Of course, we love tilt-shift and this video uses the technique perfectly. Though, we’d like some explanation about why it opens with someone getting rescued from the ocean by a helicopter. Well, Carnaval is crazy like that.

A timelapse journey through the American Southwest

by Jessica Festa on


While I don’t think anybody would dispute that the American Southwest is beautiful, this timelapse video by Henry Jun Wah Lee of Evosia Studios takes the region to a whole new level of breathtaking. Without using words or special effects, the Los Angeles-based filmmaker brings the landscape to life with dancing fog, vibrant sunrises, detailed rock formations, and curvacious craters that appear to flow like a woman’s skirt. The photographer’s mission in his work is to inspire people who spend their time in cities to get out and re-connect with nature. Through this video, you’ll get to explore the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, North Coyote Buttes, the Upper and Lower Antelope Canyons, Rattlesnake Canyon, the Eastern Sierras, Vermillion Cliffs, Yosemite National Park, Grand Staircase Escalante, and the December 2011 Lunar Eclipse.

So how did he create such a stunning masterpiece? Jun Wah Lee explains it took, “a little bit of luck, a lot of traveling and sleepless nights, and a lot of practice!”