One Photographer, Two Stolen Bicycles, 10 Cities, 100,000 Pictures: A Timelapse Tour Throughout Europe

A photographer who took an epic journey ranging from the southern tip of Europe all the best way to northern Germany visited 10 cities and created 10 mesmerizing timelapses.

Kirill Neiezhmakov pushes the boundaries of what’s attainable in hyperlapse and timelapse images. For his journey throughout Europe, the Ukrainian photographer experimented with AI-generated video-to-video morphing transitions, creating head-spinning visuals that seize the viewer’s consideration.

The first metropolis Neiezhmakov visited was Seville in mid-July when the Andalusian capital was baking in 44 levels Celsius (111 levels Fahrenheit) warmth.

“Hunting for shadows just to set up my tripod became a daily ritual, and I quickly adopted the Spanish siesta tradition to wait out the worst of the afternoon heat,” Neiezhmakov tells PetaPixel. “Since this was the very first city, I was still figuring out the logistics and testing gear combinations on the fly.”

Next up was Valencia. This is the place Neiezhmakov developed his “seamless flight” visible idea, which grew to become the signature of the whole collection.

For the AI morphing transitions, Neiezhmakov tried out three totally different AI picture fashions: Pixverse, Kling, and Seedance 2.0.

“Pixverse is capable of surprisingly creative and unexpected transitions,” he explains. “Its main downside is unpredictability — you can go many attempts without a usable result, and occasionally it produces bizarre artifacts.”

Neiezhmakov says that at one level, Pixverse randomly generated a white cat leaping out of a constructing window, flying down the road, and diving right into a fountain. “It is, however, very affordable, which makes experimenting forgiving,” he provides.

By the French metropolis of Lyon, Neiezhmakov switched to Kling for his transitions. “Kling follows prompts significantly more precisely, and with practice, I was able to write increasingly complex multi-part prompts describing the exact direction of motion, lighting changes, and architectural texture — and get a usable result on the first attempt far more often.”

While issues had been bettering technically, Lyon was additionally the scene of a catastrophe when the bicycle he had been utilizing to get round on was stolen on the primary night time.

“A full day lost to police reports and stress. But Lyon’s free city bike system (Vélo’v) saved the project,” he provides.

For every metropolis Neiezhmakov visited, he would put apart roughly three days for capturing. While there, he would seize between 40 and 60 sequences, with every sequence consisting of 150 to 300 frames. The complete journey resulted in a number of terabytes of knowledge.

But in fact, capturing is only one half, then comes the enhancing. For every timelapse, the intrepid photographer spends two to a few days processing the RAWs, color-grading, and stabilizing in After Effects. Then he spends a day or two looking for the appropriate music, then an extra two to a few weeks for the complete edit: meeting, AI morphing transition era and choice, sound design, colour ending, and exporting.

“Total post-production time per video was in the range of three to four weeks,” he says. “By the later episodes, parts of the pipeline had become faster as my workflow matured — but the AI transition work actually grew more time-intensive as my prompts became more ambitious and complex.”

“This project was the most demanding undertaking I’ve attempted as a solo self-funded creator,” he continues. “Physically exhausting and financially draining — but invaluable as a learning experience in technique, AI tools, workflow, and resilience.”

Throughout the journey, Neiezhmakov used a Laowa 15mm f/4.5 Zero-D Shift lens to fight the attitude distortion usually present in architectural images.

“When you tilt a normal wide-angle lens upward to capture a tall building, the vertical lines converge — the classic ‘falling buildings’ effect,” he explains.

“Correcting this in post-production means cropping the image significantly, which is costly when you’re already working with a compressed RAW sequence. The shift lens solves this optically: by physically shifting the lens element upward, I keep the sensor plane perfectly parallel to the building facade and include the full height of the structure without any perspective distortion and without losing a single pixel of resolution.”

With his lens working effectively, Neiezhmakov had gear issues elsewhere: his alternative bicycle was stolen whereas in Rotterdam.

“I’d owned the replacement for barely a week when it disappeared from a busy bike rack in broad daylight. It was a serious blow to my morale.”

Most of the pictures Neiezhmakov takes are a 4 to five-second publicity, creating easy, fluid movement trails of the individuals and automobiles within the shot. It’s why he makes use of a tripod.

“A gimbal cannot hold steady at these shutter speeds; any micro-correction movement it makes appears as a smear or shake in the frame at exposures longer than roughly half a second,” he explains.

He additionally makes use of a Vertecfoto GH-V5 geared head to exactly re-align the digital camera in order that the identical reference level sits in precisely the identical place within the body because the earlier shot.

“The process works like this: I set up my tripod, identify a fixed reference point on a building — a window edge, a corner, a lamp post — take a photo, then physically move the tripod a short, consistent distance forward (typically 15–30cm depending on the desired speed),” he says.

“The tripod-plus-geared-head combination remains, in my view, the only way to achieve this specific aesthetic in a moving hyperlapse.”

More of Neiezhmakov’s work may be discovered on his YouTube and Facebook.

Image creditPhotographs by Kirill Neiezhmakov