Thursday, December 30, 2010

Star Trek

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.

Night of the Shooting Stars

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!).