Over eight days in July 2013, the filmmaker behind aprilgarden travelled Iceland shooting timelapse, letting clouds race, light shift and water flow at many times its real speed. The result, Beyond Nature Iceland, compresses hours of Icelandic sky into a few minutes of film.
Beyond Nature Iceland: the film
The film is credited to aprilgarden (4월의 정원 필름, "April Garden Film") and was shot between 9 and 16 July 2013. The kit was compact: a Samsung Galaxy NX camera with 12–24 mm, 30 mm and 50–200 mm lenses. The soundtrack is "Rise" by Tony Anderson.
It became the first in a series. aprilgarden followed it with Beyond Nature II, shot in Bolivia and Chile, and Beyond Nature III: Iceland Winter, returning to the island in the dark season.
How timelapse works
Timelapse records frames far less often than they are played back. The speed-up is simply the playback rate divided by the capture rate:
- Shoot one frame a second and play at 30 frames per second, and the scene runs 30 times faster.
- Shoot one frame every 30 seconds and every second of film covers 15 minutes of real time.
- Short exposures give a crisp, stop-motion look; exposures of about half the interval blur moving clouds and water into smooth streaks.
An intervalometer fires the shutter at a steady rhythm, and slow motorised sliders or pan heads add the gliding camera moves that make modern timelapse feel cinematic.
The technique is older than it looks. Georges Méliès used it in a feature film in 1897, F. Percy Smith filmed The Birth of a Flower in 1910, and in the 1920s Arnold Fanck brought it to the mountains in his Alpine films.
Why Iceland suits timelapse
Iceland gives a timelapse photographer constant motion. The island, about 103,000 km², sits directly on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart, and volcanic landscapes shape much of the country. Lakes and glaciers cover around 14% of the surface, and Atlantic weather moves through fast.
July adds very long days near the Arctic Circle, giving photographers hours of low, golden light and enough brightness for clouds to read clearly across the frame.
The Ring Road, Route 1, loops 1,332 km around the island and links many of the best-known viewpoints, which makes an eight-day shooting trip like aprilgarden's realistic.
For more moving landscapes, watch Teide through a time-lapse sequence or see Andy Lee’s different treatment of Icelandic light.
Related reading
- Stian Rekdal’s Iceland: Thousands of Photos Become a Film
- Eyjafjallajökull in Time-Lapse: Sean Stiegemeier’s May 2010 Film
- Strokkur Geyser: From a Blue Dome to a Column of Spray
- Crystalapse in Iceland: A Landscape Film with a Personal Ending
- Iceland’s Blue Lagoon: Geothermal Water and the Landscape Around It
- Andre Ermolaev’s Iceland Aerials: Seventeen Studies of Water and Land
Sources
- Vimeo: BEYOND NATURE ICELAND Timelapse by aprilgarden
- Wikipedia: Time-lapse photography
- Wikipedia: Iceland
- Cover image: photographer unknown
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