From 4,500 Stills to 90 Seconds of Sky: My First Timelapse

From 4,500 Stills to 90 Seconds of Sky: My First Timelapse

I've been photographing storms for a while now, but this one's a bit different. This isn't about a single frame anymore — it's about time. After two weeks and roughly 3,500 miles chasing supercells across the Great Plains, I decided it was time to stop just freezing moments and actually try stitching them together. So here it is: my first ever timelapse, built from that trip, and honestly, I'm chuffed with how it turned out.

Watch it here: https://youtu.be/4UzHTTeM53I

It's only 90 seconds long. Ninety seconds doesn't sound like much until you realise what went into it.

The numbers behind the seconds

Over 4,500 individual images went into this thing, each one over 200MB straight off the camera. Do the maths on that and you'll understand why my hard drives are quietly weeping in a corner somewhere. Every one of those frames is a still photograph in its own right — the same discipline as shooting a single shot, just repeated hundreds and hundreds of times while a supercell builds, boils, and eventually blows itself out over the Plains.

Turning that mountain of files into something watchable meant leaning heavily on Lightroom for the initial processing and LRTimelapse 7 to handle all the deflickering, keyframing and smooth exposure blending between frames that Lightroom alone just isn't built for. I cannot recommend LRTimelapse enough, honestly. For someone completely new to timelapse work, it makes an genuinely intimidating process feel manageable. There's a real learning curve to understanding keyframes and ramping exposures as the light shifts from golden hour into storm-green and then into darkness, but the software holds your hand through it in a way that meant I could actually focus on the creative side rather than fighting the tool.

The MacBook did not enjoy this

I will say — my MacBook was not built for this kind of punishment. Chewing through thousands of huge RAW files while rendering a timelapse is about as far from "light editing on the sofa" as it gets, and the poor thing groaned the entire way through. I did have a proper look at treating myself to an Apple Studio with the M3 Ultra to make this kind of workflow painless. Then I looked at the price tag. Turns out taking out a second mortgage isn't really in the plan right now, so the MacBook and I are just going to have to continue our slow, patient, slightly resentful relationship for a while longer.

What I actually learned

This project was never really about producing a masterpiece — it was about learning the entire pipeline from scratch: capturing the right sequences out in the field while storms were literally rolling towards me, processing that volume of data without losing my mind, and finally getting a finished piece of video up onto YouTube. Every step of that chain had its own little learning cliff, and I've got a lot more respect now for anyone putting out polished timelapse work, because there's a huge amount of unseen graft behind those smooth few seconds of footage.

Creatively, I kept things pretty simple for this first attempt — I wanted to prove to myself I could get from card to finished upload without everything falling apart. Next time round I'll push further on the creative side: more intentional sequencing, better pacing between clips, maybe experimenting with hyperlapse movement rather than a fixed frame. But for a first go, built entirely on the back of a storm chasing trip and a lot of patience, I'm properly pleased with it.

If you fancy two weeks of Great Plains skies compressed into a minute and a half, the link's above. Let me know what you think.

Mike