Photographer Compiling Huge Timelapse Library of Plant Life Cycles
Photographer and botanical expert Neil Bromhall has compiled a massive library of captivating timelapses over the course of the last several years. From watching a butterfly emerge from a cocoon to the full blooming cycle of various flowers, Bromhall’s ever-expanding library is insanely impressive.
Bromhall is a timelapse photographer and Emmy Award-winning wildlife cameraman and cinematographer. He previously filmed underwater documentaries — Bromhall is a qualified Dive Master — and has filmed around the world. He was eventually asked to join a BBC team that was filming The Private Life of Plants (1995) with Sir David Attenborough, the project that earned him the Emmy.
The many films he’s contributed to include Footprints in the Forest, The Life of Mammals, Life in the Undergrowth, Dangerous Australians, and Arachnophobia. The independent films he’s contributed to include Vampire Hunters, Blood Suckers, Crime Scene Creatures, and The World of the Unborn, among others. You can see his entire filmography here.
Bromhall would go on to shoot 16 additional years for the likes of the BBC and CNN before devoting his time to macro and timelapse filming in his studio in Oxford where he works on a huge online garden and plant database called Right Plants 4 Me. That database can be accessed as both a website and an app for both iOS and Android and contains more than 15,00 photographs and 240 time-lapse sequences as well as information on plant care, growing schedules, and pruning tips. For those who enjoy planting and growing flowers, this free database can serve as a hugely valuable resource.
PetaPixel has featured Bromhall’s work in the past, but since then his library of photos and videos has dramatically expanded.
In a few videos, Bromhall reveals that his camera of choice is a Nikon D500, which is an upgrade over the D300 he used back in 2015.
The sheer volume of content on his channel as well as the quality is really special, and his work seems to be relatively unnoticed. Most of his recent videos have less than 1,500 views at the time of publication, which is a shame since the content is extremely high-quality.
Bromhall shoots the timelapses on his YouTube both for his database as well as for licensing purposes on Shutterstock. He uploads new videos to his YouTube with relative frequency, so for more compelling timelapse footage, make sure you subscribe to his channel.
