Grab a coffee, sit back and watch a year in the life of the Southern Alps.
Irish backpacker Colm Keating has created a novel memory of his one year working holiday in New Zealand.
Over the course of his year, Keating took 50,000 images in the Southern Alps, mostly from around Queenstown at places like Black Peak and The Remarkables, but he also ventured to Wanaka, Mt Aspiring National Park and Aoraki/Mt Cook National Park. he used the images to make a timelapse film of a year in the life of the Southern Alps. (You can see the film below.)
“I wanted to have a film based on the main reason I came to New Zealand – the mountains,” Keating said. “Living in the middle of the Southern Alps, it was easy to draw inspiration from them.
“Being able to see them every day, I observed the character of each mountain as it went through the seasons and even daily weather changes. These were what I wanted to capture through the timelapse.”
Keating selected 5000 images to make his timelapse film, which covers dawn through to dusk and all four seasons in just three–minutes.
“The idea was to show the mountains in a way that you can’t see from a snapshot or looking for a short time,” he said.
Keating took most of his images on a telephoto lens to single out one or two peaks at a time and to show the weather directly around them. Many of the images were captured on camping trips, with the camera left to run for a few hours and set to take a photo every two to 10 seconds.
“Capturing clips in the field can take anywhere from 10 minutes to four to five hours,” Keating said. The final cut took around three weeks to compile.
“For me, the film holds a lot of sentimental value and I enjoy having some of my experiences in New Zealand captured in it.”