In the second half of 2019 I had begun to get into and learn about time-lapses and how my skill and passion in still photography could be transformed to be effective in a moving form too. Being able to see something that I couldn’t see otherwise by speeding it up by 150x is a very unique tool that helped me stretch my creative muscles a little more. One of my favorite photographers of all time is Michael Shainblum partially because of some of the time-lapse films he has done where he drops the viewer into an environment and shows them multiple views to help them better imagine what this place or what this event looked like.
When the wet season came to New Mexico in late July/early August I had no intention of trying to capture all of it but that would quickly change. There was one afternoon I saw some of my friends photographing an incoming rain wall from Albuquerque’s south side so I went to a small lookout ridge near my house to try and catch it coming into the city and ended up with a beautiful short video of this rain drenching the city (along with my bag and camera). I was so enthralled with what I had just captured that I wanted to keep the party going and went a little west to see what the storm clouds looked like in that direction and ended up taking around 6 different time-lapses that day.
When editing them that night I came up with an idea to emulate Shainblum’s style of story telling with time-lapse photography and make my own short film showing the grandeur and impressiveness of New Mexico storms, and that’s what I did. For the next 2 weeks or so I mounted multiple large expeditions in many directions trying to see impressive clouds, lightning, rain walls, or whatever other phenomena I was lucky enough to encounter.
