Portland Nights -- a City in Time Lapse

Continuing my week of excellent HD videos, here's an HD time lapse from my hometown of Portland, Oregon. The time lapse is kinetic, the camera always moving, and it shows scenes from sundown to sunrise in Portland, as winter approaches. It's beautiful, detailed, and well-edited. My favorite part is when airplanes zip by at dramatic moments (this is most apparent if you watch at 1080p fullscreen). The best part? The first and last sequences actually use HDR photography to achieve an extremely colorful look -- read more about the making of the video for more interesting trivia.

Photography and editing by Lance Page; music by Andrew Parish. Enjoy:

Here's a snippet from Page's blog post explaining the video, concerning the (mild) dangers of shooting time lapse in an urban setting:

I stirred up a bit of suspicion while getting the two parking structure roof top shots. The reason being I was literally hanging half of the six foot track off the edge of the building with the cart and camera slowly creeping out to the end as the shot progressed. The first one wasn’t too bad, right before I started the shot I was told by a security guard that I had to leave and after about five minutes of begging and pleading he finally told me I had an hour and he’d be back. So that was that, then a couple nights later I had another shot set up on the top of another parking structure and maybe two thirds of the way through the shot I noticed a bright light shining up at my camera. I looked down and saw a cop car blasting its flood light up at me. Then after the time it takes to drive in a circle 8 times there were two squad cars at the top of the building approaching me. I was spooked, thought I was really in for it. The first officer got out, asked me to take my hands out of my pockets and asked me what I’m doing. When I told him he then told his fellow officer “he’s just getting a time-lapse” and they got back in their squad cars and drove off. In the shot you can see the flashing brightness of the flood light and then the brief light from their headlights on the top of the building.

(Via The Portland Mercury.)