It took over a year of work, 260,000 images, and 6.3 terabytes of hard drive space, but photographer John Eklund’s time-lapse video of the Pacific Northwest has finally begun to make the Internet rounds, even garnering the praise of Tom Lowe, one of the pioneers of the technique.

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The video, which Eklund finally finished in August, includes, among other scenes, a river of clouds tumbling over a snow-capped mountain, shadows swallowing grassy hillsides, gnarled trees staring up at the stars, and images of the Milky Way shifting across the night sky, reflecting off Oregon’s Crater Lake.

“I choose to shoot locations that appeal to the way I would like to interpret the story of time,” Eklund wrote on his Vimeo page. “Here in the Pacific Northwest, there are endless opportunities to document the magnificence of the world around us. I have discovered that when time is the storyteller, a special kind of truth emerges.”

Other than Crater Lake, Eklund says that he shot images at Mount Shuksan, Mount Bachelor, Mount St. Helens, Oregon’s Badlands, Painted Hills, Cape Kiwanda, Mount Hood, Lost Lake, and Cannon Beach.

Eklund began his career as a portrait, wedding, and landscape photographer, but his “passion for photography truly ignited” when he randomly discovered time-lapse video while he was perusing YouTube one day, according to his website.

“I discovered an artist posting time-lapse cinematography work under the name Mockmoon2000. I was captivated–and inspired,” he wrote.

If Eklund’s video has your interest piqued, his website also includes other time-lapse videos and still images.

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