The image most people get when they think of Moscow in the winter is something like an old, bleak, black and white soviet movie. Dreary and washed out, people huddled in thick clothes, clouds of steaming breath escaping from chapped lips, shivering under the overhangs of oppressing gray buildings.
Ukrainian photographer Kirill Neiezhmakov thought much the same, but he when he visited the city to document it with a Time Lapse video, he learned a secret that many who haven’t visited Moscow don’t know – by night, the winter drabness disappears to reveal a spectacular city of lights and beauty!
The old world architecture is accentuated by reflections and colour, and the moving lights created by the time lapse technique create a beautiful organic flow.
The other unique aspect of this video is the fact that this isn’t any ordinary time lapse, it’s a Hyperlapse.
Click the link above to see the Wikipedia definition of Hyperlapse, but in simple terms, this means the photographer actually moves the camera laterally between each frame capture. For reference, there’s 24 or 25 frames in a single second of footage, and a time lapse captures a frame around every 10 seconds. This means the camera has to be moved, carefully levelled and framed up, and fired to capture a single frame 1500 times for one minute of footage.
As you might guess, this is a technique that takes a ton of patience, care and skill. Luckily, as you’ll see in the video, Kirill has this in spades.
In addition to the painstaking capture process, all the frames then need to be loaded into the computer for post production, which means tweaking each frame for exposure, colour and framing, smoothing out any jitters or flicker, and then editing the footage all together and adding the spectacular transitions.
So yes, to get results like you see in the video, there’s a TON of work and talent involved. Big props to Kirill for this amazing undertaking, and be sure to check out his other awesome videos on his Youtube page.