Reefer Madness

I'm burning a vacation day. I'm getting over a cold. When I do those things at the same time I just hang around the house and relax.

What's more relaxing than the sound of a camera's shutter clicking at regular intervals?

Nothing.

I made a couple of videos of my Lava Lite. (Well, the Lava Lite company now seems to call their product "Lava Lamp." I guess they decided if you can't beat them, join them.)

The first one was shot in the living room with a towel as its backdrop. It shows what a Lava Lite Lamp goes through in the hour and 45 minutes after it is turned on. I put my little clock next to it so you can see how long things are taking.

I shot it at a rate of one picture every three seconds. There are looooooong stretches of time where nothing really is happening (other than the clock spinning). So I have played back the static periods at 60 frames per second to get things moving. Where there is actual activity I play it at 15 frames per second.

The initial sploosh of the lava takes only five frames so there was no point in trying to slow that down. The lava just appears. When we're speeding up action, any action that starts out fast goes by in the blink of an eye. Sorry.


While I was recording the warm-up video, I watched other folks' YouTube time-lapse videos of Lava Lamps. I plagiarized a couple of their ideas and made a second video.

I hauled the Lava Lamp to the bedroom and put it on the dressing chest in front of the mirror. I lowered the black-out shade and fired things back up. The lamp had cooled down so it starts out with no action. I closed the door to keep the room as dark as possible (but the sun came out from the clouds and lights up the background). After a couple of hours I went back to check on things. There was no noise coming from the bedroom. The battery had died after a little more than an hour and a half.

Well, the single charge was used to capture last week's tide and all this lava action. I should have thought about the battery but I didn't. It's pretty impressive that a single charge of the battery can take more than 6200 shots that went into these movies.

Here is the Lava Lamp in the dark in front of the mirror. This one was shot one frame per second and played back at 24 frames per second.


And just because I can, here's an animated GIF of the frames where the lava makes its first out-of-the-body experience. You have to click on this thumbnail to see it in action.

House of Sand and Fog, Part II

Yesterday, we experienced a "King tide" here on the west coast. This is a very high tide followed by a rather low tide. (The east coast probably had theirs as well but I wasn't there.) I had a vacation day I needed to use. The weather forecast said that rain was going to move in late Friday afternoon. Low tide was going to happen in mid-afternoon so chances were good that I could record the full range of this extreme tide.

I got up at my usual time and had a breakfast of a toasted bagel. I didn't have my usual bowl of cereal and mug of orange juice and I skipped my morning shots of espresso. There were going to be six and a half hours between high tide and low tide and there was going to be no opportunity to step away from the camera to answer the call of nature. I had to avoid liquids!

I packed up my camera and intervalometer. I got a train ticket and headed over to the same spot I recorded my previous beach scene.

I got everything set up. The camera was pointing in the same direction as before with my wonderful new fisheye lens. I set up the intervalometer, plugged it into the camera and turned it on. Nothing.

Its batteries had run out.

But I was prepared! I had spares with me and installed them and fired up the intervalometer. Pictures started being taken!

I set up the camera in aperture priority mode. I didn't want to use fully automatic mode since that might change the aperture setting and change the depth of field. That really isn't much of an issue with a fisheye lens since its depth of field is very deep even with a wide aperture. I wanted the camera to adjust to changes in light level with the thinning and thickening of the clouds. I hadn't anticipated the complete clearing of the clouds.

When the clouds cleared, I was afraid that the exposure would be set too low when the sun was in the frame so I changed the exposure to manual and used the exposure setting the last automatic exposure. That way there was no abrupt change in the exposure and it wouldn't change as the sun made its appearance.

But then thick clouds moved back in and I realized that the exposure was now much too low and I changed back to the automatic aperture priority setting. At that point there is an abrupt change and things go from too dark to just right.

I seem to have accomplished all these tweaks to the exposure settings without moving the camera!

Then it got very cold and windy and the rain moved in. I had to quit. The last few frames of the video have water drops showing.

Low tide was 45 minutes after I closed up shop. It was going to drop less than another foot. I captured more than six and a half feet of the falling tide.

I started taking pictures at 8:16am, Friday, February 18, 2011. High tide was at 8:54 at 6.45 feet. I quit at 2:25pm. Low tide was at 3:25pm at -1.18 feet.

This is the graph of the tide level for the day. The "+" is when I grabbed the image.

What we have here are images taken at 12 second intervals. They're played back at 30 frames per second. Every second of the video is six minutes of real time.

Remember, this is in HD but I don't embed it as HD since that doesn't fit in the window as laid out by Blogger. Besides, some people have DSL and you know that sort of connection takes forever to load YouTube videos in low res. So I leave it up to you to select HD if you want to see it in its greatest glory. Well, the greatest YouTube offers. The original on my Mac is much, much nicer!

I don't know why the music doesn't play for me unless it's in full screen mode. I wonder if it plays for you.


When I got home I wasn't desperate to use the bathroom. If the weather had held out I would have been able to hold out myself!