Have four minutes to spare? Take a tour of California with this timelapse video

The average timelapse video on the internet focuses on a specific location, such as a mountain range or a city. Which isn't a bad thing at all -- after all, there's a lot to see in many cities, and some beautiful alpine views including sunrises, sunsets and starry skies are always beautiful to behold. Hal Bergman, however, chose a different, less restricted approach to his latest video, 'California.'

California is a huge place. As Hal puts it in the description of his video on Vimeo, "it's almost double the size of the United Kingdom and slightly larger than Japan. If it was it's own independent country (as it was briefly for a few weeks in 1846), it would have the 8th largest economy in the world by GDP."

In order to fully appreciate California's diversity, you'll have to travel it from North to South, and from West to East. Which is exactly what Hal Bergman has done, over the course of four years. Always with him was a DSLR (either a Canon 5D Mk II, a Canon 6D or a Canon Rebel T4i) as well as a couple of lenses, which he used to capture the splendor of California's land- and city-scapes.

The final result of his four-year tour through California is the timelapse video of the same name, which covers beautiful scenery from all around the state, including Death Valley National Park, Joshua Tree, Lake Tahoe, Los Angeles, Napa Valley, San Francisco, Yosemite National Park and more. While the list of places featured in the video is quite impressive by itself, but it's Hal's description of the amount of work put into it that really puts things into perspective:

"The average clip took 1-3 hours to film and another 3-10 hours to edit. Several cuts are from clips more than 24 hours long. I shot 423 clips over four years to make this (...)"

The result of all that work is a captivating four-minute video that takes you to some of the most beautiful places that California has to offer. If we didn't know better, we might be tempted to think we're watching an official promotion video commissioned by the state's tourism division.

So if you have four minutes to spare, we highly recommend you indulge in Hal's video and soak up some beautiful California scenery. And if you'd like to see more of Hal's work, head over to his website or take a look at Magic Window, his live wallpaper app for OS X which features timelapse views of landscapes and cityscapes from all around the world.

All photographs in this article are © by Hal Bergman and used with permission.

(via Fstoppers)