Cactus Flower

I've shown pictures of cactus blossoms at What's Up, Chuck? and described how they open in the evening and collapse the next day. Such a rapid change (but still over the course of a day) is an obvious subject for a time-lapse video.

Last Sunday evening gave me the opportunity to record the opening of one of the cactus blossoms.

I set up the camera and set my intervalometer to take a picture every two minutes. I set my LED desk lamp on a paver next to the camera to light up the cactus while the sun was below the horizon.

I started taking the pictures for the video at 6:36pm and let it go until 6:52 the next morning. I didn't get much sleep that night. I fretted about my camera sitting unattended in the back yard with a light shining near it. I shouldn't have worried so much. There was a lot between the light and the street so passers-by wouldn't have noticed anything.

Here's the first frame of the video. The flower is already opening. And there's a second flower about to open. Could they open together?

The cactus is lying on the ground. We had a wet winter and apparently the plants stored a lot of water and became top heavy. Many of the cactuses got so heavy their tops broke off. That's OK since cactus pieces simply take root and several new plants grow from each of the fallen parts.

The video starts while the sun is up. The lighting changes as the sun passes behind trees and clouds. When it sets, the desk lamp lights the scene with sharp, uniform lighting. The sun rises and the sharp shadows go away.

The second bud didn't open.

I raced home that evening to record the flower's end. Unfortunately, the collapse was well underway by the time I got home. And the neighboring bud was opening.

I had marked where the legs of the tripod were the night before and set the camera back where it was. I started the camera back up. I wanted to get a good night's sleep so I took the camera into the house when I went to bed.

I made my video by just letting the first segment play till I shut off the camera in the morning then continue with the second evening's segment with no transition. The second evening's action was in full swing and I didn't want to lose any action in a dissolve or fade. There is a major discontinuity but you'll get over it.

My video shows the first blossom opening from 6:36pm one evening until 6:52am the following morning. It then picks up (with the jump...I didn't get the camera exactly repositioned) at 5:19pm that evening and finishes at 10:57pm that night.

The shots were taken at two-minute intervals and play back at 15 frames per second. That works out to an hour going by every two seconds. Remember you can watch in full screen and in HD.

There are more flower buds developing. I'm going to try to record the opening and closing of a flower in one take. I'll take a day of vacation or work from home if I need to.

Airport 1975

Sequels usually aren't as interesting as the originals. These videos probably continue that trend. I think they're fun to watch but my video of incoming flights just seems to have more pizzazz.

After we wrapped up the incoming flights sequence we went back to the hotel. Our room was on the 14^th floor of the Airport Hilton. Our window faced the eastern ends of the south runways.

I put the camera as close to the window as the tripod would let it get and pulled the blackout curtain around it. I fired up the camera and watched the activity for a while. You can see a bit of reflection from the lights in the room on the left side of the video for a while. The camera snapped away for a while after the lights went out. Some time later I woke up, turned off the camera and closed the blackout curtain all the way so the morning sun wouldn't wake us.

This nighttime video of the airport shows the activity from 10:50pm until 12:15am. The planes are usually hard to make out. You see mostly their lights lighting their way. Watching in HD and in full screen probably will help.

This was shot at a rate of a frame every six seconds and played back at 15 frames per second. You see a minute and a half each second.


I started the camera again in the morning. We watched the planes a bit then went off for breakfast. The camera kept snapping away while we ate.

This time you get to see planes. This shows you Saturday morning's traffic from 7:15 till 9:20. I was hoping for fun cloud action but there is only a little churning on the right side.


It's fun to watch planes. I hope you had some fun, too.

Airport

We took last week off from work and checked out sights and shopping venues around Southern California. One of our trips included an overnight stay in Los Angeles.

Back in 1976 I took a semester off from school and took a job with Rockwell International ("Where Science Gets Down to Business"). An alumnus from New Mexico Tech was working there and told the head of the Computer Science department they wanted to hire an intern. They recommended me and I was happy to take a break from school.

I had no idea what the job was until I got there. It was in a department that did programming for the B-1 Bomber. I didn't make any real contributions to the program so I'm not really a baby killer. I was just a gofer. But that's what interns often are. I went back in June, 1977, for a second stint but got laid off the day after Jimmy Carter canceled the bomber's development.

Rockwell's plant was on the southeast corner of the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). They had bleachers set up at the north edge of the property for us to sit on and watch the activity of the airport. As you can see from my map I lived and worked very near the airport activity. As if that weren't enough I would watch the planes from other spots around the airport.

The constant stream of planes coming and going at this airport has been calling me to make time-lapse videos. Since we were spending the night in the area I finally had the opportunity.

I set up the camera at one of my old plane watching spots (shown in my map to the south of the airport). That location gives you a good view of the planes as they line up to land. You can see their approach especially well in the evening with their landing lights shining out from the darkness. I filmed the activity from 8:30pm until 10:00pm. I shot this at six-second intervals and play them back at 15 frames per second. The hour and a half flies by in just a minute.

There are two streams of planes coming in. One lands on the southernmost runway and the other lands on a northern runway. The departing planes leave mostly from the other two runways. We can't see much of the departing flights in this video. There are occasional flashes of their lights at the left edge but they come and go in only one frame so there's no motion.



The movie starts while the sky is still blue then goes gray. For your comfort and convenience, here's the first frame of the movie in its full technicolor glory.

Planes are magical. Too bad the terrorists have won and flying is a pain in the butt.