Dustin Farrell spent three years chasing light across the deserts of the American Southwest and the ice of Iceland. Landscapes: Volume 3, released on Vimeo in January 2013, was the closing film of his time-lapse series, and it shows places most people only ever see in still photographs moving through days, nights and storms.
Dustin Farrell’s Landscapes: Volume 3
Farrell’s Landscapes series began with Volume 1 in 2010 and Volume 2 in 2011. For the third film, according to DIY Photography, he worked across the entire desert Southwest and made two trips to Iceland, one in summer and one in winter. Astronomer Phil Plait, writing for his Bad Astronomy blog, singled out the giant scalloped blocks of clear ice that appear in the Icelandic sequences.
When he released it, Farrell wrote on Vimeo: “I hope you have enjoyed my work on this series over the last three years,” calling it “an amazing ride full of amazing experiences.” He added that he would keep shooting landscape time-lapses but that videos “of this magnitude” would be hard to produce on a regular basis, as Universe Today reported.
The camera gear behind the film
Volume 3 was shot on a Canon 5D Mark III, moved along Dynamic Perception time-lapse rails with an eMotimo TB3 motorised pan-and-tilt head. That combination is what gives the shots their slow slides and turns: between each frame, the motors shift the camera a tiny amount, so when the frames are played back the viewpoint glides through the scene while clouds race and stars wheel overhead.
In a Fstoppers time-lapse guide, Farrell explained his night workflow:
- Body: a full-frame Canon (5D Mark III or 6D), chosen for resolution and clean high-ISO files, sometimes at ISO 6,400.
- Lenses: a 24mm f/1.4L II, or a 14mm f/2.8L II for a wider view.
- Settings: wide open at f/1.4 with 20–30 second exposures for the night sky.
- Processing: raw files adjusted in Adobe Camera Raw, assembled in After Effects as a 4K sequence at 29.97 frames per second, with gentle digital pans and zooms, and noise reduced in Neat Video.
How time-lapse turns hours into seconds
A time-lapse is a series of still photographs taken at a fixed interval, then played back as video. Shoot one frame every ten seconds and play the result at 30 frames per second, and five minutes of real time pass in a single second on screen. A two-hour sunset becomes a 24-second clip.
That compression reveals things the eye cannot follow in real life: the way clouds pour over a ridge, how a shadow sweeps across a canyon floor, or the steady rotation of the stars around the celestial pole. A fixed foreground, such as a rock outline or a mountain, gives the viewer something steady to measure the motion against.
Shooting the desert Southwest and Iceland
Farrell’s two settings could hardly be more different. The desert Southwest offers dry air and dark skies far from cities, ideal for long night sequences of the Milky Way. Iceland brings fast-changing Atlantic weather, glacier ice and, in winter, long nights for the aurora.
If you want to try a simple time-lapse on your own trip, start small: a sturdy tripod, a camera with a built-in interval timer, manual exposure and focus so the frames match, and a scene with something that moves, whether clouds, water or people. Stay with it for at least an hour. In cold places such as Iceland in winter, carry spare batteries in an inside pocket, as the cold drains them fast.
For other approaches to the same idea, explore Vincent Brady’s panoramic night-sky film and Kaspars Daleckis’ Latvian aurora sequence.
Related reading
- Ten Unusual Natural Phenomena: Storms, Ice, Light and Rock
- David Attenborough’s Wonderful World Montage: Nature Through Voice and Editing
- Planet Earth: A Short Landscape Montage
- Vincent Brady’s Planetary Panoramas
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