It's not often that you get the opportunity to travel all the way around the world, but I've been lucky enough to be able to take a sabbatical for a few months to visit some of the places I've always wanted to go and catch up with friends along the way. I wanted to make some kind of record of the journey and had been experimenting with time-lapse photography so I decided to make a time-lapse film.

Camera and Lenses

I wanted to travel light with nothing more than a rucksack and a daypack for all my luggage, so the camera equipment would have to fit solely in my carry-on luggage. My early experiments with time-lapse were all with my Canon 7D, it's a great camera but it's quite bulky to carry around. At the time I also owned a Panasonic GH2, which is a micro 4/3rd format stills camera which also shoots great video. I decided to take three prime lenses, the Olympus 12mm f2.0 and 45mm f1.8 and the Panasonic 20mm f1.7.

One of the benefits of the micro 4/3rd format is because the sensor in the camera is smaller, everything else is smaller. The amazing thing about these lenses is, not only are they optically very good, but their combined weight is only 333grams. My APS-C format Canon 17-55mm f2.8, which covers a similar sort of range weighs in at 645g on it's own. Add in the 7D body and the total weight is nearly 1.5kg. The GH2 all and all three lenses weigh less than than 7D body, after years with DSLRs it's very liberating to have such a small light set up.

Support

To keep the camera stable I took a lightweight tripod, the Velbon Ultra Rexi L. This tripod packs very small (36cm) and extends reasonably high (1.53m). It's pretty stable, in most conditions, but I wouldn't suggest using it when there's a rapidly approaching storm blowing in, because it will wobble, but then again on the day in question there were 40 mph winds and I think most tripods would. But in normal conditions it's absolutely fine. I put a small Manfrotto head on the tripod and we were away to the races.

Storm approaching in Akaroa, New Zealand

The only thing about carrying a tripod around on holiday (which this was) is that also gets really old, really fast. Too much weight. So I took a Gorillapod SLR, they have super bendy spider-like legs that you can wrap around more or less anything, or just perch them on top of things like a regular tripod. The Gorillapods have two bits, the bendy legs and the head. There's something very important that you need to with the head when you get it. As soon as you get it and not a moment later...

Throw it away.

Seriously just do it. The legs on the other hand are a work of genius. I put the little Manfrotto ballhead on it when I wanted to use it. The great thing about the Gorillapod is that it's super small, you can put it in your bag and forget about it, which means you can take it everywhere with you.

And take it everywhere I did. It was perched on top of some rocks in the shadow of Mount Doom, was on a fencepost overlooking Santiago, wrapped around a balcony while having lunch in Valpariso, straddled a wall outside Sydney Opera House and sat on the floor in the Grand Palace in Bangkok.

Balancing the Gorillapod on a fencepost overlooking a very hazy Santiago in Chile

After 10 days in Rio we took a trip to the incredibly beautiful Ilha Grande in Brazil. We walked through the rainforest to a waterfall and while we were having a rest I set up the camera with the Gorillapod on some rocks to capture the scene. I left it running while we relaxed and at that point in the middle of the very tranquil jungle, a woman and her guide appeared over the top of the waterfall and abseiled down. I'd like to say I'd waited for hours for the shot but that would clearly be untrue, however I'd never have got it if I was relying on larger camera gear, I simply wouldn't have had the camera with me.

A Blurred Vision

One of the things that attracted me to time-lapse photography in the first place was the streaks of light you can get when photographing traffic at night. It's caused by having a very slow shutter speed, which means that moving objects pass through your frame while the shutter is open leaving a streak of light. You can see the effect on the bridge in Hoi-An in Vietnam.

But also more dramatically on the streets of Saigon.

Traffic pulls off from the lights in Saigon, Vietnam

Everyone drives a scooter in Vietnam, cars are heavily taxed and the streets look like chaos. One of the things that make Vietnam such an amazing place is that while there's strong individualism at work, there's a collectiveness too. In Hanoi we were told to cross the street in the Old Town, you just walk out into the road, it's a smaller place than Saigon and a different kind of crazy, but it does actually work, you walk out in to the road and the traffic parts around you. It takes a degree of commitment to your fellow man, a steady walking pace and a healthy dose of common sense. (I'd like to point out I take no responsibility for anyone walking into the middle of the road and getting run over though!)

I tried to capture that feeling to an extent in Saigon,where thankfully there more traffic lights and street crossings that people actually use. Where you can see the traffic parting around the camera I'm actually set up behind a road sign at the end of the Ben Thanh market, so there was no danger of an idiot Westerner causing an accident.

It's easy to achieve the longer shutter at night because it's dark and there's not much light in the first place. If you want a motion blur effect in the day you need neutral density (ND) filters in order to reduce the amount of light coming into the lens. In the daytime you might be getting a shutter speed on 1/1000 but be looking for something closer to 1/2 or 1 second. I took some Heliopan screw-in filters, an ND 0.9 which cuts three stops of light an ND 3.0 filter which reduces light transmission by a whopping 10 stops. This will slow a shutter speed in broad daylight from 2000/1 to 1/2second.

Even with a good quality filter, a filter this strong introduces a colour cast to the photo, which needs to be corrected for in post-production but it does allow you to create interesting effects. Without the filters you get a very staccato effect in movement (which can work in some circumstances), but with them you get nice smooth movement in water like the Hukka Falls in New Zealand.

I also had a set of Lee graduated filters and ND filters with a filter holder, I didn't carry these with me that much as they did add bulk, but they're really useful for sunsets or sunrise. There's lots of posts on the internet about how to do this. For those who are curious I mostly used aperture priority mode, which you can see on the sunset of the over Ipanema beach. Here you can see the shutter speed changing in the picture as night falls and the traffic movement goes from sharp to motion blurred lines. It's quite a nice effect, if you're really clever you maintain a constant shutter speed so the motion remains the same in the shot, this is more complex to achieve. One way to do this is by switching filters as you are shooting. There's also software and devices to help do this. Dedicated time-lapsers describe a smooth sunset or sunrise transition as the Holy Grail, which may over egg the subject a little, but you get the idea it's difficult to find. I'm still looking...

The motion blur becomes more pronounced as night falls and the shutter speed lengthens

Motion and Emotion

Douglas Sirk, director of a string of 50's Hollywood melodramas, (Imitation of Life, All that Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind) once said, 'motion is emotion'. Which has stuck with me for a very long time. He was saying that camera movement was one of the things that differentiates cinema and theatre - it's a visual language we all understand now. I had seen a time-lapse film where the camera moved a few years previously and been amazed by it. Shortly before my trip I discovered eMotimo, it's made in San Francisco by elves (Ok actually a man named Brian Burling and his incredibly helpful team). It's a motion control time-lapse head, which conveniently fits in a backpack. It allows you to pan and tilt the camera while recording a time-lapse sequence.

It's incredibly easy to use and lightweight. I'd advise spending some time getting to know it though before trying it out for real. The first full day of our trip to Brazil our friends suggested going up Corcovado to see Cristo, (Christ the Redeemer).

Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

I'm not religious but it was one of the highlights of Brazil for me, the views are stunning and the art deco statue of Christ is impressive regardless of your religious leaning. I also thought 'that'll look good as a time-lapse'. There were two small problems, the first was the day before had been cloudy and windswept which would have helped to convey some motion, today there was not a cloud in the sky. The second and more significant problem is to this point I'd only had the most rudimentary attempts at operating the eMotimo. I was using a shoot-move-shoot sequence where the shutter opens, the shutter closes the eMotimo moves the camera a tiny step, the shutter opens, closes, moves etc. (In order to allow everything to settle down between shots you add a small delay or static time. Then you have sharp footage. On top of Corcovado the delay I set was slightly too short so you can see a little bit of a pulse in the final video as some shots aren't completely sharp because the camera is moving before the shutter closes, there's a tutorial here which goes into more detail.)

Getting to grips with the eMotimo at the top of Corcovado

However, lessons learnt and subsequently I used the eMotimo when time allowed on the trip. I think the movement brings an extra dimension to the film adding a sense of wonder and I'm a big fan of the product. For instance in the pan around at the top of Mount John above Lake Tekapo in the South Island in New Zealand. You really can't take in the view in one go (the image below's about 8 photos stitched together), it's breath-taking and the water really is that colour of turquoise - it's to do with glacial erosion which deposits a fine powder of rock into the water called glacial flour.

In addition to the eMotimo, I experimented a little with placing the camera on moving objects. In Halong Bay in Vietnam, we took a three day, two night trip around the bay and its jaw-dropping limestone karsts. It was overcast for two days but on the final day we had brilliant blue skies. The boats have a slightly worrying open platform on the front, which as it turns out is the perfect place to put your camera, which resulted in the long tracking shot in the film.

When I got back to Blighty I set about putting the film together, it took quite a while fitting it between work for paying clients. Initially I cut it to a commercial track, but I knew I wanted to put it online eventually so Richard Lewis at Meduktions very kindly agreed to write some music for me - I'm really pleased with results - it has a warmth and a magical quality to it that reflects my memory of the trip.