Cactus Flower, Part II

A month ago I showed a video of two cactus blossoms opening on a fallen cactus on consecutive nights. It shows a blossom opening one night then that blossom collapsing while the second one opens the following evening. I went to work and didn't want to leave the camera unattended so there's a gap in the action.

I ended the post saying that I'd like to capture the opening and closing of a blossom in a single take and that I'd take a day of vacation if I had to.

I took a day of vacation yesterday.

Another blossom opened on that cactus Sunday evening. I set up the camera and LED desk lamp next to the cactus and set the intervalometer to take a picture every four minutes. I let the camera snap away from 4:05pm Sunday until 11:05pm Monday. Thirty-one hours.

The four-minute intervals result in 15 pictures being taken each hour. My video plays them at a rate of 15 frames per second. We see the 31 hours go by in just 31 seconds.

The daytime sections are lit by the sun and the nighttime sections are lit by the desk lamp. The shadows at night are sharp and don't move. The camera's nighttime exposures got set for the general brownness of the background. The white of the cactus became very overexposed much of the time as a result. The camera did the best it could.

(HD, as usual, is available...see the bottom right corner of your player.)

A Single Man

This answers the question you've all been asking: "What does Chuckbert do in bed?"

Sometimes I sleep.

We see me in bed lit only by the hall light and the TIX Clock on the nightstand. I have terrible eyesight so I can't see a normal clock without moving my face right up to the clock. The TIX clock has big dots that I can see from my pillow. There are a couple of LEDs in the hours section that are very dim. When they happen to be the lights that are lit the light level goes down quite a bit. I think that is why this video flickers so much.

I set the camera to its highest sensitivity and put the camera into aperture priority mode at its widest F-stop. In this mode the camera sets the shutter speed to get the proper exposure. During the night the exposures were two to two and a half seconds long. Near the end when dawn is breaking the exposures are only ⅛ second long. Cameras are so smart!

The shots were taken every 20 seconds. They're played back at a rate of 30 frames per second. That shows us 10 minutes each second. An hour every six seconds. Whew! I need to rest!

There isn't a lot of activity here. I'm apparently not a restless sleeper.

The Andy Griffith Show

I love peanut butter. From the beginning of my time in junior high school until I graduated from high school six years later I brown bagged it nearly every day. And almost every day I took a peanut butter sandwich. I still take peanut butter and a bagel for lunch these days.

A few years ago I showed how I make peanut butter with our Blendtec Blender on What's Up, Chuck?. I showed pictures of the peanuts in their shells, the shelled peanuts and a YouTube video of the peanuts being ground in the blender.

I made a batch of peanut butter tonight. I made about half as much as I showed in my earlier movie. But this time I made a time-lapse movie of the whole process. I shell the peanuts, grind them and scrape the peanut butter out of the blender into a jar. All in 33 seconds.

I shot the shelling segment one frame every three seconds. When I finished shelling the peanuts I changed the interval to one shot each second. The movie is played back at 30 frames per second.

Peanut smoke! Don't breathe this!

The Blob, Part 2

Another quick movie featuring Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty.

I put two blobs of Thinking Putty on a plastic sheet and propped it up against a wall. One blob is the Strange Attractor with its Neodymium Iron Boron (NdFeB) magnet beneath the putty. That initially combines its force with gravity to help pull the putty down.

The other putty is the heat sensitive Twilight Thinking Putty. This video doesn't really demonstrate its color changing capability.

To add some visual interest I made a turtle impression on each blob of putty. Watch those turtles slide!

The Strange Attractor putty is much stiffer than the Twilight so it doesn't flow down the sheet of plastic very fast. But it has the magnet pulling it down. Who do you think wins the race?

This is two hours and 40 minutes of putty action. I took a picture every 24 seconds and play them back at 24 frames per second.

The Blob

Here's a quickie.

A long time ago I got some of Crazy Aaron's Strange Attractor Thinking Putty for a time-lapse subject. I finally got around to using it in its own movie!

It's like your old Silly Putty but blended with iron filings. It's magnetic.

My movie is in two segments. I started each segment with the shots taken each second and gradually increased the intervals to 10 seconds. The first segment shows 30 minutes. The second shows 47 minutes. I play them back at 15 frames per second. After a while the action slows even in the time-lapse video so I sped up the ends of each segment another eight times. That makes the action of the final bits of the segments 1200 times faster than real time. Whew!



I've got more magnets. I think you'll be seeing more of Crazy Aaron.