I went on a drive to Palomar Mountain yesterday. When I was approaching the base of the mountain I realized that a drive up a twisty road might be a good subject for a time-lapse movie. It's a popular spot for guys on their crotch rockets to get a major adrenaline rush. I thought that I might get to record a lot of motorcycles passing me. But it was a sleepy weekday so nary a cycle. And no cars ever caught up to me.
I edited out a lot of the trip. You've seen four or five twists and you've pretty much seen them all. Watch it to the end...it ends well.
I took pictures at 0.7 second intervals and played them back at 15 frames per second. I let the camera decide what exposures to use.
On the way up I realized that I hadn't set the lens to the widest view so it starts out with none of the dashboard in view. That changed along the way.
I spent a night of December 13-14, 2010, watching the Geminid meteor shower and made a time-lapse movie of the event. Read my story of the night here.
I made my movie by setting the camera's sensitivity to ISO 3200 and took 16 second exposures. The intervalometer was set at 17 second intervals. So this is an almost continuous record of the four and a half hours of the night. The pictures are played back at a rate of 15 frames per second.
Things that move are not meteors...they're stars, planes and clouds. Meteors appear in single frames so they're just flashes (just like in real life!).
Before I got to the gorillas and flamingos, I had spent an hour and a half at a spot overlooking the East Africa enclosure (I think) of the Wild Animal Park. I shot three segments of a time-lapse video there.
The first segment ended when I snagged the tripod with the cord of my hat and sent the camera off to a new view.
I set the camera up again and started shooting. After a while all of the animals were leaving the spot I had the camera aimed at. So I tried something new. I loosened the nut that holds the tripod's head panning axis locked. I moved the camera a bit between shots. The panning worked somewhat but a nicer tripod with some sort of fine control of the camera's direction would be nice. I then tried to adjust the zoom of the lens. That failed miserably. The zoom control of the lens is quite stiff so the whole camera rocked and I couldn't adjust it in tiny steps.
I then shot another segment with a wide angle view.
I pasted the three segments together into one minute-and-a-half video.
This was shot at a rate of a frame every three seconds and played back at 24 frames per second.
Flamingos move faster than gorillas but they can still be rather static. Because they do move I shot them at a rate of one frame per second. I played them back at 24 frames per second.
I bumped the camera so there is a bit of a discontinuity around 0:26. At around 0:34 you the flamingos run back onto their island. This is because a keeper entered their area to give them some food. After the keeper left they evacuated the island (around 0:40) to get the food that was just left.
I spent a day at San Diego Zoo Safari Park (formerly called San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park). I took my intervalometer around and made some videos.
One stop, thank you Jerry for the suggestion, was the gorilla's enclosure. Gorillas sit and sit and sit and don't move a lot. A perfect subject for a time-lapse video. Throw in the throngs of people looking at the gorillas and you have a dynamic movie.
I set up my camera under a tree out of the way of the people and aimed it at the large male who was sitting in a cave. It's hard to see him till he comes out into the sun. He's joined by three other gorillas.
Near the end a keeper appears above the enclosure and she throws treats down to the apes. Then the keeper moved to the other end of the enclosure and threw more treats. The gorillas left my end and the video ends.
While I was shooting the gorillas, a little girl wanted to know what I was up to. I told her that I was making a time-lapse movie of the gorillas and would be uploading it to YouTube. She wanted to give me her phone number so I could call her to let her know when the video was there so she could watch it. I thought it wouldn't be a good idea for her to give someone she doesn't know her phone number. I wrote down the keywords that should find the video once it gets posted. I gave that to her mother. I wonder if she'll look at it now that it's available.
I had the camera take a picture every two seconds for 56 minutes starting at 12:18pm, Friday, November 12, 2010. I cut out many frames at the beginning since they showed only the empty enclosure. The big male just couldn't be seen. The shots are played at 24 frames per second.
It was shot at a rate of one frame each five seconds for just over two hours starting at 8:22am, Sunday, October 24, 2010. It's played back at 24 frames per second. I manually set the exposure at f/10 for 1/400th second. The ISO setting was 200.
It was shot at a rate of one frame each five seconds for half an hour starting at 2:17pm, Saturday, October 23, 2010. It's played back at 24 frames per second. I manually set the exposure at f/8 for 1/400th second. The ISO setting was 200. We get to see the scene get darker when there are thicker clouds.
It was shot at a rate of one frame each five seconds for an hour and 40 minutes starting at 11:21am, Saturday, October 23, 2010. It's played back at 30 frames per second. I let the camera decide on the best exposure for each frame.
A weekend at the Grand Canyon produced several time-lapse videos. The story of this second one is told atWhat's Up, Chuck?
It was shot at a rate of one frame each five seconds for just under three hours starting at 7:06am, Saturday, October 23, 2010. It's played back at 30 frames per second. I let the camera decide on the best exposure for each frame.
It was shot at a rate of one frame each five seconds for half an hour starting at 5:24pm, Friday, October 22, 2010. It's played back at 15 frames per second. I let the camera decide on the best exposure for each frame.
My little freezer built up a lot of frost. It was time to defrost the thing. Melting frost seemed like a time-lapse opportunity.
We dragged the freezer onto the front porch and propped open the door. I took a picture every five seconds and made a movie playing the shots at 30 frames per second.
I included the whole insides of the freezer in my pictures. After watching the first movie I wished I had just zoomed in on the top two shelves. Then it dawned on me that iMovie might have a way to crop the movie. It does.
So I cropped the movie.
But it lost a fun feature.
After I started shooting the movie I thought that I should have had a clock in the shot. So I put a clock in front of the base of the freezer after about an hour of shooting. That part of the movie got cropped out.
Then I thought that I could make a movie that is just cropped to include only the clock and somehow paste it into the movie cropped to the top two shelves. QuickTime Pro came to my rescue!
Here is my movie that has been cropped to the interesting shelves and has the clock portion of the original movie inset at the bottom. There is a ugly square down there until the clock shows up. And the clock was only partially visible in the original movie (but you get to see enough to know what time it is).
I started shooting the movie at 9:15. The movie gets most interesting right at noon...be patient. And watch it in HD and expand it.
This is a view out the back bedroom's window. It shows a little more than 12 hours of the ash tree in the back yard with the clouds whizzing by. The day before I shot this there were scattered, fluffy clouds out there. Here we get to see pretty much constant cloud cover.
I shot four frames each minute and play them back at 24 frames per second. That works out to having six minutes compressed to each second of the video. Near the beginning, three birds appear in the tree and just sit there for two or three seconds (12 to 18 minutes in real time). Later, a bug lands on the window and walks out of the scene. That takes a few seconds of the video.
It probably would have been better to have less of the tree and more of the sky in the scene. But we get some good cloud action.
Here is a video of a SandScapes toy I got this summer at Otowi Station. Multicolored sand, glitter and water flow through gaps in wavy lines of plastic between two panes of glass. This results in pretty mounds of sand. You put this on your desk at work, flip the toy on its pivots and watch the sand drip. Over and over again. You don't get your work done.
Since the sand's motion is quite noticeable, I had the camera take pictures at a relatively high rate of two frames per second. My movie plays them back at 24 frames per second. We see 20 minutes of dripping sand in just a minute and 40 seconds! Exciting!
I taped a piece of white paper behind it to give it higher contrast than the wall would have. The paper is waving in a breeze and is kind of distracting.
One of the holes has some glue in the gap. Sand snags on it and it frequently clogs. Oh, well.
I tried my hand at making a movie of a flower opening. I recorded a Naked Lady opening. Well, it had gotten well under way by the time I got the camera rolling but we get to see some of the action.
I set up the camera to take a picture every 15 seconds. That was much more frequently than was needed. I ended up leaving four out of five shots on the cutting room floor.
Here are almost seven and a half hours of a flower opening in just 15 seconds.
I like the beginning where there were clouds. The light was more uniform. But when the sun comes out the shadows moving are fun. Then near the end the wind picks up and the flower wobbles. That's nature for you.
I wish I had gotten this started while the flower hadn't already been open so much.
Here we come to the end of this phase of our Ikea projects.
We decided that my little computer area needed just a little more storage. So we got a little file cabinet with one file drawer and three shallow drawers.
This project came close to going into the trash barrel.
This was shot at one frame per second and played back at 30 frames per second. That means that each minute flies by in just two seconds. The assembly runs smoothly until about 3:00. At that point I just can't get through step 27.
Step 27
It didn't help that there is nothing holding the bottom of the drawer to the side rails. The rails are held to the back with little hooks punched in the sheet metal so they are free to flop about. So the sides of the drawer have to be held against the bottom while you lower the drawer to its front panel and push all those pieces toward the top of the drawer face.
My thick skull kept interpreting the arrows to mean the drawer face is what moves up. So I kept trying to slide all the pieces in the wrong direction. Over and over again. You'll notice just before the pieces all go together that they suddenly are on the floor a couple of feet away from me. I wonder how they got all that way away from me. The drawer is finally put together around 3:30. Remember, one minute goes by in two seconds. The 30 seconds of the video that it takes me to assemble the drawer means I fought it for 15 minutes. This video nearly ended sometime in this segment.
Here is my last Ikea project for a while. I tried to make the last frame play for five seconds so you can linger over the finished product but that didn't seem to work. Sorry.
Coming soon to a browser in front of you: Yet another Ikea project.
This time I assemble a bookshelf with a set of drawers and doors in some of the cubbies.
I should have shot this at a frame every other second and played it back at my usual 24 frames per second. Instead, I set the camera to take a picture every second. That took just too long to play back at my usual rate. So here it is at 50 frames per second. I could have saved 3,600 uses of the shutter. Live and learn (maybe). You get to see the two hours and four minutes it took to build the shelf in only two minutes and 26 seconds.
Only you have to provide the music. Here are the words:
The most beautiful store I ever shopped: Ikea, Ikea, Ikea, Ikea … All the beautiful rooms of the world in a single stop … Ikea, Ikea, Ikea, Ikea … Ikea! I've just found a store named Ikea, And suddenly the gloom Has exited the room For good! Ikea! Say it loud and there's music playing, Say it soft and it's almost like praying.
As you might have heard, we had another Ikea project. Our spare bedroom has had gym equipment in it for a while so there hasn't been room for a real bed. Our guests have been relegated to an inflatable bed. Since we are skilled Ikea furniture assemblers, we got a sofa that converts to a bed.
This project had fewer parts than the computer desk. The instructions were for only one product and it had no optional parts. No disassembly required!
This was about 50 minutes shot at one frame every second played back at 24 frames per second. It could have gone together much faster if we had use real tools. They gave us a cheesy wrench to hold the nuts. It didn't hold them very well.
Well, a little bit more than just watching an ant hole.
This time I gave my red ants three delicious treats: a chunk of bread that was dipped in my scrambled egg (while still raw) then soaked in water, a crushed Stacy's pita chip and Trader Joe's grated parmesan cheese.
I thought the cheese would be very popular because it is fatty and easy to carry. I thought the pita chip would be good because it's fatty. The eggy, soggy bread would be attractive since it gave them protein, starch and water.
I guess the ants were thirsty. They really worked on the bread. The pita chip crumbs were enjoyed. Many times the little ants were so thrilled with their pita chip chunk that they'd race off with it. Not to their hole but off in some random direction. Those little ants really can carry many times their weight. And they can go very fast while carrying it.
A little of the parmesan cheese was taken.
I'll give you two versions of this one. One that lasts 46 seconds and one that is three times faster.
I had the camera take pictures every second for an hour and a quarter. I need to stop wasting uses of the shutter. I used only every fourth frame for the first movie and even fewer for the faster one. I'll learn.
Here are ants eating their treats at a rate of one frame taken every four seconds played back at 24 frames per second. In the first few seconds a couple of largish pieces of the pita chips are seen going down the hole.
And here they are speeded up three times. You can see the edge of the bread shrink. I don't know if it's from being eaten, drunk or from evaporation.
Ikea is a fun store. It's huge...acres of products you get to put together yourself. It has tables. It has beds. It has lighting. It has everything.
Except well-written instructions.
The instructions aren't so much written as drawn. This is necessary because one set of instructions needs to be understood by everyone in the world. So they're in pictures.
Usually the pictures get the point across and projects go together without any problems. But now and then a step is illustrated in a way that lets some people (me) get things wrong.
Here we have a time-lapse movie of Jerry and me putting together a corner desk with two extensions.
The problem with the instructions for this project is that they are for desks whose main work surface is either on the left or the right side of the corner. The illustrations didn't make clear (to me) how the frame is put together to accommodate the different models.
So you get to see me attach the corner frame on the wrong part of the main frame. Then we compound the error by putting the wrong extension on that frame and attaching a leg to the wrong piece. After we figured out what pieces go where the desk went together rather quickly.
I think this video is more fun than if we had gotten it right the first time.
The video was shot at one frame every two seconds and played back at 24 frames per second. The two hours and 10 minutes it took to build are given to you in two minutes and 42 seconds.
When I showed my first attempt at a time-lapse video of a car driving through traffic, I said I'd like to try it again on a Friday evening when the freeways have been very congested (sniffle, cough!, cough!) where I'd get to see more of the stop-and-go interplay between the lanes. And I wanted to take the video from the front seat where I'd get to see more of the roads and less of the car's interior.
I spent time at lunch securing the camera's tripod to the front of the front seat with bungee cords. It seemed rather stable.
Before I left for my drive home I checked the traffic conditions. It showed the freeway was moving right along. Very little red indicating slow traffic.
I'm disappointed. But what can I do?
I took a longer route to the freeway and got on one exit to south from my regular on-ramp. My plan was to get in one of the middle lanes where traffic seems to go slowest. But there was only a brief period of slow-and-go traffic. Oh, well.
Here's a video of the activity of a colony of ants. They're foraging for food. They aren't doing any housekeeping. So all we see is ants coming and going. Occasionally some of the sand or dry grass moves. Around 0:43 an ant drags a largish piece of the grass from the top edge near the right side of the frame and drops it near the hole. At 0:51 somebody moves it out of the way. That's the most thrilling moment here.
I'll have to try this again when they're cleaning out their tunnels. After a good rainstorm, perhaps.
What we have here is made up of shots taken every second for an hour played back at 24 frames per second. Nothing interesting happens.
Really.
Update at 2:30am: Woke up with an "Aha!" moment. "They're foraging for food." Chuckbert, give them something to eat and watch how it's taken down the hole! What will we watch them eat?
In my other blog I told about my trip to a dark spot in Southern California where I watched the Perseid Meteor Shower. I hinted that there might be a time-lapse movie of the goings on in the sky that night.
Here it is.
I went to a scenic view spot southeast of Julian where I watched one of the spectacular appearances of the Leonid Meteor Shower. It was a popular spot. Several people were already there when I arrived around 9:00PM.
I set the camera on its tripod and aimed it to the northeast. I took a few test shots with various ISO settings and exposure times. I settled on 15 second exposures and an ISO sensitivity of 2000. I set my intervalometer to take pictures every 16 seconds. I started taking my pictures of the sky around 9:30.
The camera happily took pictures until about a quarter after two. Then the battery died. Somehow I noticed that it was no longer clicking. I replaced the battery with my spare. I managed to swap the batteries with only a four and a half minute gap without even moving the camera much.
I let the camera continue snapping away for a little more than an hour. I then was feeling very tired and decided to head home.
I made the video at a rate of 15 frames per second. The nearly six hours are compressed to a minute and 21 seconds.
I was surprised to see that there is as much traffic in Southern California's skies as there is on its freeways.
I captured some bright meteors in the pictures. Since they appear only in single frames of the video they don't move and they appear for only 1/15th of a second. You can see some of the meteors if you happen to be looking at the spot where they appear but you won't see any motion, just flashes.
I'd like to do this again without the glow of Palm Springs at the bottom of the frame. But the glow adds some interest, I think.
The spot had cars coming and going through the night. Their lights occasionally light up the bushes in the foreground. Again, I think that added interest. A few times the cars went around the loop the wrong way and their headlights aimed directly on the camera's lens making some bright, full-image flares. Oh, well.
Remember, you can watch in HD by selecting the resolution at the bottom right of the player. You can watch in full-screen mode, too.
I had used my camera to take pictures of the night sky and was impressed with the results. The camera was still new and I didn't change the ISO sensitivity. Even with the speed set to ISO 200 even dim stars showed up well in the long exposures.
I thought that if I increased the sensitivity I could take short exposures of the night sky that would leave the stars as dots rather than streaks. It works pretty well.
We were having a period of cloud-free nights. But the clouds decided to move back in the night I decided to try to make my first movie of stars. Moving clouds are a good subject for a time-lapse movie so this wasn't a disaster.
In the first attempt at a video of stars moving across the sky you get a very brief glimpse of the head of Scorpius. Then the clouds completely cover the scene.
I had set the camera's ISO sensitivity to 3200 and took 5 second exposures at 6 second intervals (meaning the shutter was closed for one second between shots). It's played back at 15 frames per second.
The rooms you see through the windows are lit only by the light in the hall. The trees are lit by street lights and house lights. The clouds are lit by Escondido. The stars are lit by nuclear fusion.
This didn't satisfy my desire to watch the stars move across the sky. I made another video another night. This time I pointed the camera to the north. You get to see the Big Dipper rotating around Polaris. A couple of airplanes fly across the scene.
I should have checked Heavens-Above before I made this video. It turns out that the satellite Lacrosse 3 was making an appearance in last few frames. It rises from the horizon and crosses the Dipper's handle. If I had checked for appearances of satellites I would have let it keep taking pictures and captured its whole pass. That's a project for another day!
The Big Dipper video was made with the same settings as the clouds covering Scorpio.
The first one is a wide-angle view where we can see the birds at the seed tubes, beneath them and in the distance. There are times you can see some bunny action near the fence you see at the top right.
This was shot at a frame every 1.5 seconds and played at 24 frames per second. The camera shot the pictures for an hour and 17 minutes. I need to have a checklist when I set things up. This time I had the pictures saved with too little compression so the files were bigger than I wanted. The camera was set up outside the garden room where I was reading the newspaper. I noticed the periodic noises from the camera had stopped. The memory card had filled up so the camera stopped taking pictures. It's just as well, I had taken more shots than I really needed.
Here are all the shots I took.
I would like to see have had the feeders on rigid supports rather than hanging on hooks. The swinging adds too much motion. I'd rather have the birds be the only things moving.
I enjoy seeing the birds hopping toward the feeders on the ground from the distance. And there's a dove hanging around whose feathers puff up periodically that's interesting.
I got a second memory card and zoomed the camera in on the seed tubes. I set it to take one shot every two seconds. Again, after a while I noticed that the camera quit making noises. This time it was because the battery died. Another checklist item! It took pictures for 50 minutes. This was long enough.
Every Thursday evening Oceanside has a Sunset Market. It has a farmers' market, a food court, a bandstand, tchotchke booths and so on. I took my camera and intervalometer over there and recorded the comings and goings of the crowd near the intersection of the two streets in the middle of the market.
It was a lot more crowded than I thought an every-week market would be. There was a lot activity.
I set the camera to record one frame per second. About the time I started taking the pictures, the sun was setting. I set it to be in aperture priority mode so the shutter stayed open longer and longer as it got darker. After a while it seemed to me that the shutter was trying to stay open longer than the one second interval. So I bumped the interval up to two seconds.
When I looked at the information about the exposures, they never reached one second. So I didn't need to change the interval. But this gives us the opportunity to compare movies of crowds when shot at one frame per second and a frame every other second.
As I said, this was at the intersection of two streets. I would like to have been able to take the movie from the roof of a building at the intersection. From the street level we just get to see the crowd passing in front of the camera. From above we'd get to see the people negotiating their ways through the crowd as they go from one street to any of the other three directions (four when you count U-turns).
Here's a view from the street of 40 minutes of the Sunset Market. While I was taking it, a couple of kids came up to me and asked me to take their picture. I told them that the camera was already taking pictures. They clowned for the camera till their mother dragged them away. You can't miss them.
Next street scene needs to be from above the action.
(Again, a version of this video has been seen on my other blog. Sorry. This won't happen again!)
I had to try the old time-lapse-movie-from-a-moving-vehicle schtick. I took my camera to work with me with the plan of recording the trip home. I spent my lunch hour trying to decide how I'd set up the camera.
I put the camera on my tripod and stood it on the floor in front of the front passenger's seat. It seemed to be very wobbly there. So I considered the back seat. I moved the front passenger's seat all the way forward and set the tripod in the space between the seats. It seemed rather wobbly there, too. I hadn't brought anything to tie it down (and I haven't figured what I could have tied it to anyway).
I ended up putting it in the back seat.
I set it to take a picture every 7/10ths of a second. I started the camera, got in and took off.
As I drove, I looked in the rear view mirror to see how the camera was managing. It was wobbling but there was nothing I could do. I went around corners rather gently to keep the tripod from tipping over.
I pasted the frames together at 24 frames per second. I was happy with the result. The wobbling isn't terribly apparent in the finished video. I especially like the stop-and-go period just before I got off the freeway. I wish I had had more of the stop-and-go. Maybe I'll try this again some Friday evening when all of San Diego heads north.
This version of the video is slightly different from the one I posted earlier. I didn't put a title at the beginning. And I uploaded a higher resolution version. You can play it in HD! Just select the 720p HD item from the little menu at the bottom right corner of the player. You can expand it or even watch it full screen. Yowza!
When I do this one again I will try to figure out how to secure the tripod in the front seat. Having more of the road visible and less of the car's interior would be more interesting. And I need to remember to set the white balance to something other than auto (I'm getting better at it but I forget). I also forgot to cover the viewfinder. The sun was shining in it as I went down the hill at the beginning and made mucked up with the exposure a bit.
For several evenings, we were having sunsets that turned a very pretty red so I tried to make a movie of one. This turned out to be last of the pretty sunsets. Since then the sky has been clear at sunset.
I had the camera set to do its automatic exposures. It had taken some nice sunset pictures a month earlier on our trip to New Mexico with its automatic program so I figured it would capture the beauty of this sunset. It got glimpses of some redness but it doesn't show the beauty of the scene.
This was about an hour and 18 minutes. I had it take a picture every eight seconds and play them back at 24 frames per second.
In the last four or five seconds you can see Venus in the upper left hand corner.
I'm going to have to research how to set the exposure for clouds. I'm having very little luck with them so far.
I tried to see what morning clouds being burnt off looks like again. This time I put the camera at the front door looking east. But it didn't work out very well.
Focus, Chuckbert, focus!
I somehow didn't manage to get the camera focused at infinity. Or even at the things in the foreground. Everything is blurred here.
This video covers the time from about 6:30am until 9:55am on August 1st. I had the camera take a shot every 12 seconds again and played them back at 24 frames per second. For nearly three of those three and a half hours, the clouds just hung on. Pretty dull.
Once the clouds started being burnt off, things pick up. You have to endure 34 seconds of gray. At least that's better than three hours.
A few days after I posted that video my intervalometer came in the mail. I knew what I was going to do with it as soon as I figured out how to use it and got some light out in the garden room where I roast my coffee.
I shot a video of the entire roasting process with a clock next to the roaster. This video served many purposes. Among them:
I got to show off my newest gadget.
I got to show a clock spewing out the passage of time.
I got to answer the question of how long it takes to roast coffee.
Coffee roasting, start to finish:
I looked at the timestamps of the segments from the original video and found that from start of the preheat to the end of the cooling was about 25 minutes. So I figured that's how long it would take to roast the batch for this video. I then needed to come up with a bit of music to accompany the finished video. It needed to be short and evoke caffeinated hyperactivity. Rimsky-Korsikov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" seemed to cover all that. My recording of it lasts a minute and 33 seconds. I decided to make my video at 24 frames per second. I needed 93 seconds (the length of the music) at 24 frames/second. That meant that I needed around 2200 frames. I planned on shooting around 1500 seconds of roasting (25 minutes times 60 seconds/minute). Dividing the 1500 seconds by 2200 frames, I came up with 0.68 second per frame. I set the intervalometer to have the camera shoot a picture every 0.7 second. I turned on the intervalometer as the second hand approached the 12 and hit the start button on the roaster when it reached the 12. My hand makes appearances when I dumped the beans into the roaster after the preheat period and when I needed to make adjustments to the heat element and the fan. When the cooling finished and the roaster shut off I let the camera take a few more shots then turned off the intervalometer.
The first five seconds after the title were just five frames at one frame per second. The rest of the video was made of the shots shown at 24 frames per second. The music I chose lasted just the right amount of time.
I had intended to have some time left ticking on the clock after the roaster had come to a full stop. I was going to have the video go back to having the clock tick once per second and have the video to black. But I wasn't paying attention. I let the camera keep taking pictures for a few seconds after the bar stirring the beans in the cooling tray stopped moving. But the roaster's drum was still coasting to a stop. The drum quit spinning just a few seconds before I shut off the camera. Not enough for a fade out. Shoot!
Better, more uniform light would have been nice to have.
My second test movie shows the morning June Gloom (At. The. End. Of. JULY!) burning off. It was shot at one frame every 12 seconds. The movie is played at 24 frames per second. That makes the wind sculpture even more hyperactive than in the previous post. After the low clouds are gone there's a brief bit of the high clouds moving at a nice pace.
I let the camera do its fully automatic exposure business. I probably should have figured out a single exposure value and set the camera to use that value for the whole movie.
I'll figure this out. There's help out here on the Internet.
Here is my first time-lapse movie. It was taken in my back yard at sunset.
This was taken one frame every six seconds. The wind sculpture by Lyman Whitaker has had way too much caffeine. A frame every second would have been a much better rate. But what did I know? This was my very first attempt.
I like how the reflection of the bedroom's window moves across the yard.
I used QuickTime Pro to put the frames together in the video at 24 frames per second. I did no other processing.
I recently got a new camera, a Nikon D90. It was at Costco, so it must be a good camera! It has all the features I want in a camera and more. It's an SLR. It came with two zoom lenses. It takes videos.
But one thing I wished it could do is take time-lapse movies. I've always found speeding action that is otherwise imperceptible to be fascinating. One of the first shows I taped when I got my first VCR was Nova's "Moving Still," a program that showed us what we normally can't see because it happens too slowly or too quickly. I never erased that tape. I wonder where the collection of video tapes is.
One day I happened to think to Google something like "Nikon D90 time lapse." The results of the search sent me off to find how time-lapse moviemaking can be done with a digital SLR camera. All I needed was an intervalometer.
One of the first intervalometers I came across at was the Pclix LT. There were others that are less expensive but for some reason I kept going back to see if the Pclix was the one I wanted. It seemed to be quite versatile and somewhat simple to set up.
I got that gadget.
For what I've done so far, it is simple to set up. For intervals longer than 89 seconds or for having it control the camera in bulb mode, I will have to reread the manual.
Let's see what I can do with my intervalometer. I'll post examples of my successes. And failures. Maybe I can learn something about this art and make something of it.
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