The new project by Aspen-based photographer Thomas O'Brien, simply titled Meteor, is making our minds melt and simultaneously reinforcing the now-classic True Detective line: "It's all one ghetto, man. A giant gutter in outer space."
The short but oh-so-sweet video is a project seven years in the making. O'Brien told The Creators Project that he's been experimenting with timelapse since 2005, but has never done anything with the footage until now.
He typically works with landscape photos and panoramic views, and often he'd leave his camera on while shooting stills.
"I never even looked at some of the images I shot,until this winter when I reorganized my entire library," he told us.
O'Brien ended up finding over 500,000 images in his lightroom catalog that he hadn't published, including an excess of photos from the "consistent and reliable" meteor showers the Geminids, the Perseids, and the Leonids.
He uses mostly a Canon 5DM3 and shoots in 6 and 7k when capturing full resolution raw sequences. Then he uses a program called LRTimelapse to process all the footage.
"It's unique," he added "because it can ramp an adjustment in Lightroom over time to the original raw images...smoothing out the exposure adjustments so its a perfect exposure at the start and end of the sunset."
At one point, his biggest challenge was technological limitations such as RAM size and battery length, but says "it's been getting easier and easier to capture this type of filming."
The landscape photographer has so much footage that he'll soon be releasing new timelapses shot in Utah, Hawaii, and Aspen—again all from old footage he found. This goes to show the wonders that cleaning your studio can offer an artist.
Watch the timelapse above, and head over to O'Brien's website and Flickr page for more starry glory.