Another Sunset

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.