This time we watch the Hottop Coffee Roaster up close. I used my fisheye lens so I could look down the roasting chamber and down into the cooling tray.
You'll see:
The roaster preheat!
The green beans appear!
The beans churn!
The beans go from green to brown!
The beans GROW!
The beans cool!
A clock in the corner showing you how long things really took!
A strange man in the background fiddling with his iPad!
The settings I used made the exposure a little long so the drum and beans are somewhat blurry. And, like stagecoach wheels in old Westerns, the drum rotates the wrong way. When I set up the light, I didn't have anything in the roaster so I didn't notice that the camera was going to be shading part of the window. I did see that the light's reflection was there on the window but there isn't a lot going on in that part of the chamber. Well, there is the heating element...it might have been fun to see it glow and dim as the roast progressed.
The pictures were snapped every second and are played back at 30 frames per second. The 30 minutes go by in just one minute.
The last frame of the video was my camera's 168,813th picture. The shutter apparently is rated for 100,000 cycles. I suppose I ought to send it in for a checkup and maybe a new shutter.
2012 was supposed to be a great year for meteor showers.
It was a bust.
This year, the moon's phase was new or at least before first quarter on the nights of all the major meteor showers' peaks. This was going to give me excellent opportunities for time-lapse movies of meteors.
Each one was rained out.
The peak of the Geminid meteor shower was the morning of December 14. Jerry and I scheduled a vacation day for the 14th so we could stay out all night in a dark location and record the shower then catch up on sleep later in the day.
Unfortunately, the wrong kind of shower happened. It rained.
We went out around 10:00 the night of the 13th to see if the sky was clearing up but there wasn't a star to be seen. We went home. Around 12:30 I looked out the window and saw bright stars in a hole in the clouds. We bundled up and went out to our driveway and saw that the clouds were breaking up.
Instead of getting back in the car and trying to find a dark spot, we just set up our reclining camp chairs in the driveway. I set up the camera. Before the camera got ready to record the meteors that might outshine the cloudy, light-polluted sky, we got to see some really impressive shooting stars.
After the camera got snapping, there weren't a lot that were bright enough to see. And the clouds came back. But they cleared up again for a little while. Then they came back and started dropping rain on us. We had had enough after only an hour and a half.
I took 15-second exposures every 16 seconds. I ended up with 308 pictures. I found four whole meteors in those pictures. It wasn't an impressive meteor shower in Escondido.
Here's a little movie of that hour and a half. You get to see two views of the sky. The first part simply plays the images as they were exposed (they are somewhat overexposed) at a rate of 15 frames per second. The few meteors appear for only a single frame so you probably won't see any in the first part.
For the second segment, I darkened the sky to try to compensate for the exposure. The clouds got really wild with that treatment. I also stacked the images with each new image at full brightness and the previous images progressively fading. That made the stars have short trails and the meteors appeared then quickly faded. I added pointers to the meteors so you have a small chance of seeing them. I also added a timestamp to each frame so you can see time fly. The timestamps are on daylight saving time. I forgot to change the camera's clock when time fell back.
I see the Leonids and Geminids won't have the moon ruining the view next year. Let's hope the weather cooperates. I want to get a movie with meteors!
Your best chance to see the meteors in this video will be to watch in HD.
I've wanted to get some camera motion in my time-lapse videos. My camera has always just pointed at the same spot for whole videos.
A time-lapse video I watched on YouTube ended with a credit to the provider of its camera motion. I checked out the device it used and some similar ones. I settled on the StarLapse system by Losmandy. A Google search for information about the system took me to Oceanside Photo and Telescope who had it in stock. I ran over and got one!
It's a heavy thing. With all its pieces and my camera and its largest lens, it weighs more than 12 pounds. My tripods were all too feeble to support it. I ran back to Oceanside and got a new tripod and head.
This setup handles my 12 pounds nicely.
I took all this equipment out to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park (formerly the Wild Animal Park). Jerry was my Sherpa. I need a rolling case that will hold all of the camera pieces, the StarLapse and the tripod. We had to pause a lot as we walked through the park to shift the weight from one arm to another.
I recorded some scenes of the African Plains enclosure. I don't know what kinds of animals I got in the first segment. The second part is mostly giraffes.
I had the camera take a picture every five seconds. The StarLapse was panning at a rate of 40º per hour. That combination was just too fast. Especially for the first segment where the zoom was set at twice the focal length of the second segment.
I play the first segment at a rate of 10 frames per second. It's very jerky. The second segment is shown at 15 frames per second.
Another reason for getting the StarLapse is to take pictures of the night sky. Up to now, my pictures of the stars were longish exposures with a fixed camera. That results in the stars having trails. Here's a 30-second exposure of the sky last Friday with the camera fixed:
And here's the same scene with the StarLapse moving the camera at the rate the earth is rotating. No more trails (except for the airplane)!
It took me a long time to get the camera set up so I didn't get these pictures taken before the moon started lighting up the sky. Its glow is seen at the corner of the pictures. The picture isn't all that great but it does show potential. You can see a lot more of the Pleiades than just the Seven Sisters. Unfortunately, the sky isn't dark and is rather blotchy.
I'll need to go out to the dark part of the world and try again.
A long time ago we cleaned up a heap of junk in the back yard. When we got to the bottom of the heap we found my long-lost Chia Pet turtle half-buried by gophers. Recently, while shopping at Trader Joe's I found a bag of chia seeds. Chia seeds, it seems, are today's miracle food.
Now, with a cleaned up Chia Pet, chia seeds, a camera and intervalometer in hand, I could finally make the movie I've been dreaming of ever since I started this little hobby.
I set the turtle in the garage on the crate we had our cash register shipped in. It's under the sky light that lights up our laundry area. I also pointed two LED desk lights at it so it was always lit.
I set the camera to shoot in Aperture Priority mode with a fairly small aperture so it would have a nice depth of field. I focused on the surface of the turtle but I didn't know how close the tops of the chia plants would be and I wanted them to stay in focus. I think it worked out.
I set the intervalometer to shoot a picture every 15 minutes. I play them back at at rate of 30 frames per second. That speeds up the action by a factor of 27,000.
I spritzed the turtle several times a day and kept the turtle filled with water. A couple of days after I started the processes we had some very hot days (it got up to 103º one day). I came home at lunchtime to spritz the turtle so the seeds wouldn't die before they got going.
The little plants grew quickly. After about a week I wanted them to think about dying so I quit watering the turtle. I guess the plants stocked up on the water so they happily kept living for more than a week longer.
They finally started dying but took five days to completely die and shrivel.
It took 19 days from the time I smeared the seeds on the turtle until the little plants got crispy.
1/27,000th of 19 days is less than a minute. I hope you enjoy watching the life and death of a Chia Pet. As usual, watching in the highest resolution your connection deals with is recommended.
My video of Crazy Aaron's Strange Attractor Thinking Putty swallowing a cube of Buckyballs that I featured in an earlier post is my most-watched YouTube video. It's had more than 260,000 views as I write this. It just went through a period of getting more than its usual number of views. One day it had 9,245 views. I was hoping to break 10,000 views in a day but the interest subsided. It gets a lot of comments.
Some of the comments suggest that I make another version of the video and let the putty fully engulf the magnets. I thought that that is a good idea so I tried it again. This time I kept shooting the putty vs. magnets for a full week. There's no way that the very stiff putty will completely wrap itself around my magnets.
I started with just three cubes of Buckyballs being surrounded by the putty. I realized that the action was slowing to a crawl so I added some more magnets. Then some more.
A bug makes a cameo appearance in the Blue Cube about 30 seconds into the video.
I went from taking a shot every two seconds at the beginning of the video to a shot every 45 minutes by the end. I play them back at a rate of 30 frames per second.
I added a timestamp on each frame so we can see how the action proceeds. It really gets slow by the end.
This probably will be my last video featuring Buckyballs and the Thinking Putty. It is a major effort to get them all out of the putty.
Several years ago I showed some pictures of our giant squills in bloom. I mentioned that the flowers sway and twist when they're cut and put in a vase. Ever since I got my intervalometer I've been wanting to make a video of the flowers. But, alas, they took a couple of years off.
They finally bloomed again this year. They were sending up their flower stalks just before we took a week-long vacation. I was afraid that they would have all gotten too far along before we got back to make a video. Fortunately one stalk had not yet started opening and another had just started.
I cut those two flowers, put them in a vase in the living room, set my desk lights on the floor in front of them and set up the camera.
I set the intervalometer to take a picture of the squills every five minutes. The camera snapped away for just over seven days. The camera's battery finally died the eighth night. It had taken more than 2100 shots. The pictures are played at a rate of 30 frames per second. We see two and a half hours of action every second. The week flies by in just 70 seconds.
I hope that the video below fits in your screen. You might need to change it to one of the HD resolutions and play it in full screen mode to see the full glory of all the flowers opening, shutting and waving about.
The stalks didn't wave around as much as I remembered they did all those years ago. Perhaps the constant light on them stopped the waving. I don't know. There was some at the beginning so I'm happy with what I ended up with. Maybe I'll try again next time they bloom and put dimmer light on them during the nights.
A year and a half ago I showed you a video of my time watching the 2010 Geminid meteor shower. I mentioned that each meteor appears in only one frame so you don't really get to see many of them unless you happen to be looking at just the right spot at the right time.
I wanted to make a video where the meteors last more than a single frame. I finally decided that I had to learn more about Photoshop so that I could achieve my dream. I found a Photoshop "action" that combines multiple star images into a single image. Here's an example using that action to make an image from the pictures taken from 12:30 to 1:00 that morning.
Thanks to Star Circle Academy for the jumpstart introduction to Photoshop actions!
There are quite a few meteors in this image. Many get lost in the star trails.
The action that produced this image combines all the images in a directory into a single image.
I needed to make images that combined a few consecutive images that shows a frame at its full intensity with each of the previous frames gradually getting dimmer. I tweaked the Star Circle Academy's action by adding steps that dim the previous image when adding a new image to it and saving each iteration. As a result I ended up with the same number of images as the original set but each contains all the previous images that are progressively dimmed.
You'll see what I mean, I hope.
While I was learning about automating Photoshop, I decided that I wanted to add a timestamp to each frame. That meant learning a little about Photoshop's "Document Object Model" to add a Text layer to each image that contains the image's timestamp that was extracted from its metadata.
Anyway, here's the resulting video that shows the meteor shower with the stars, planes and meteors appearing then fading away. You get to see meteors this time. There's a meteor flurry when the timestamp is around "12-14-2010 00:40"!
As always, HD and full-screen viewing is highly recommended!
What I'm posting today doesn't really support the mission statement of this blog but I'm going to put it here anyway. Maybe this blog is now about movies that show things that can't normally be seen well.
This is my first slow motion video. My new Nikon 1 camera has slow motion video capability! It can take HD videos at the normal 30 frames per second. It can also take low definition videos at 400 and 1200 frames per second. The camera lets us take five real-time seconds of video at a time. In 400 frames per second mode that ends up with a minute and six seconds of video. The frame size in that mode is 640x240 pixels.
This is my first movie using this new technology!
I have several hummingbird feeders in the back yard. The little hummers are very protective of their feeders. They seem to spend a lot more energy defending their feeders from other hummers than they get from their nectar. I'm happy to watch. It's amusing to watch them strafe intruders.
I set the camera near one of the feeders and took a lot of little movies of the hummers in action. I edit my movies using iMovie on my Mac. The camera's aspect ratio is wider than iMovie deals with so it loses much of its original 640-pixel width. This video isn't in HD so you don't need to push any buttons other than "Play."
Here's a view of the July 4, 2012, fireworks in Escondido. It's more a slide show than a time-lapse movie.
The show was at Escondido's Grape Day Park. We sat on the curb across the street from the park. We had no idea where the fireworks would show up. We chose pretty much the worst seat in the house and much of the show was behind a tree. Oh, well, maybe next time we'll know where to sit. Somehow, I think that there aren't many unobstructed views of the show in the park. I didn't know how close we'd be so I used my fisheye lens. That was another bad choice. Next time...
I took six-second exposures and set the intervalometer to take a picture every 6.7 seconds. It seems like the camera's 6-second exposure lasts around 6.5 seconds. The ISO setting was 200 and the lens was open to f/8. I play the pictures at a rate of 2 frames per second.
One of my bird feeders is for the orioles. The feeder is a flat container that hangs from a hook. It holds sugar water that the birds get to through holes near the perches. And it has some little depressions where we're supposed to put some grape jelly, one of their favorite treats. I've used this feeder for several years and, until this year, it hasn't been used by bees.
Something changed.
Bees have taken over the oriole feeder. It takes them little time to eat all of the grape jelly I put out for the orioles. I wonder if the beekeepers are bewildered with their purple honey. The bees also are fighting the hummingbirds for their nectar. Hummingbirds don't take guff from nobody so they still seem to be getting their share.
My big dollops of grape jelly don't last the day. Since the stuff goes from blob to nothing in a matter of hours I thought that this is a subject for a time-lapse movie.
I learned a lesson from previous videos of bird feeders. That is that things hanging from hooks sway and twist and aren't the best subjects for time-lapse movies. For this video, I took the feeder's hook off and set the feeder on an upside down garbage barrel. This way, the subject doesn't jerk around and the action is easier to follow.
The day before I made this video I put a bowl on the garbage pail and put some jelly in it. I wanted to get the bees accustomed to a new location so they would be ready to follow the food when I moved the nectar/jelly feeder the next day. The bees didn't care much for the jelly in the bowl but the orioles were happy with it. The day of the video I put a clock, the feeder and the bowl of jelly on trash can.
I thought I set the camera to use an exposure that would be good for the full sun period. I was wrong. It got terribly overexposed. Fortunately, after a while I decided to reframe the shot just to watch the feeder. I fixed the exposure settings for the rest of the movie.
I started with the camera taking a picture every 30 seconds. When I saw that the jelly wasn't going to make it till the end of the day I changed the frequency to a picture every 15 seconds. That's when I fixed the exposure and zoomed in on the feeder.
I can't really say what the frame rates I play things back are. After I made the initial segments of the video and put them together, I adjusted the segments' speeds a bit to make the movie last as long as the music I chose. You're probably getting tired of the same music over and over again but this time it is so much more appropriate than my earlier uses of the tune.
Jerry decided that now is a good time to give the family room a fresh look. That starts with a new coat of paint.
Here you get to see half of the room get its first new coat. The "Cheery" is being covered by "Cancun Sand." People get paid to come up with the names for paint colors.
I put the camera with its fisheye lens on top of the cabinet on one side of the room and recorded the action of the other side getting painted. I had the camera take a picture every 10 seconds. The video shows them played at a rate of 24 frames per second. That works out to show four minutes each second.
I somehow managed to mess up the focus. I started taking the pictures then realized that I had the camera set to take large pictures. That resolution isn't needed for even HD videos and makes the time to process such large images go way up. So I changed the resolution of the pictures while it was shooting and must have bumped the focusing ring. Sorry.
Because this is out of focus, there's probably no need to watch in HD. It's there if you want but why bother?
Last week, I took an afternoon off to watch the last-of-a-lifetime transit of Venus. While I was getting ready for that event I noticed that three buds in my cactus patch were about to open.
You might remember an earlier video where two blossoms were ready to open on the same cactus but they opened on consecutive nights. I was kind of hoping they'd have opened together. But I got to record one opening while another was closing. Another of my videos shows one flower opening and closing in one take.
I was lucky to be home in time to record three flowers opening together. I set the camera up and recorded the action from about 3:15 (the transit had started but I couldn't yet see it with my eclipse filter) till 10:20. I put my desk lamp on an upside down trash can next to the tripod and had it on all the time. That way, when the sun went down the desk lamp lit the scene and the camera adjusted itself to keep things pretty uniformly exposed. Ain't technology grand? The blossom looking head-on into the camera does get overexposed, but I still think technology is grand.
These flowers have always lasted less than a day. Usually, when I come home from work the day after a flower opened it is has already drooped. This time they were still in their full glory the next evening. I decided that they must be ready to wilt so I set the camera up again to record their demise. They were still open when I went to bed. I left the camera clicking through the second night and through the next day until just after the third sunset.
You might remember that one of my earlier videos watched a blossom on a cactus that was lying on the ground.
It seems that these cactuses spread not only by seeds but by breaking when they get top-heavy and taking root where the pieces land. New plants sprout all along the length of the fallen piece.
The end of this video illustrates that method of propagation.
For the first evening, I took pictures every two seconds and they're played back at a rate of 15 frames per second. The second segment was shot a picture every second and play back at 30 frames per second. The video shows an hour every two seconds.
A year or so ago there was an article in The New York Times that introduced us to the concept of cold-water extraction of coffee. I can't find that article but here is their illustration of the products described in it. The brief description says that the cold water dripper makes coffee that is "dense and sweet, almost like aged rum." That sounded good.
The contraption has a reservoir and a valve that lets you slowly drip water through the grounds beneath it. The water goes through the grounds, picking up the their goodness, and drips into the pot at the bottom. We're supposed to set the valve to let out 1 to 1.5 drips per second. This is supposed to leave behind some unpleasant parts of the coffee that hot water extracts. The instructions say the process takes about five hours to complete.
A five-hour process that doesn't have a lot of action is a natural subject for a time-lapse movie, don't you think? I did. Here it is!
It took longer than five hours. My drips took more than a second to drop. It ended up taking nearly seven hours.
I started taking pictures at a rate of one per second. After a while I increased the interval to take a picture every other second. Then I periodically increased the interval to take a picture every four, eight, 16, 32 and finally every 64 seconds. The first three-and-a-half-hours of the action take a minute to see and the other 3½ hours take nine seconds.
The video looks a lot better on YouTube's page when you watch it in HD and full screen than in the embedded player below. But for your convenience, here it is.
What you see is about four servings for us. I don't know how to describe flavors but "aged rum" might not be too much of an exaggeration. It is nice tasting coffee.
When you visit we can make you some. Just give me a little advance notice!
Here is a second video of making coffee in the Bodum Santos vacuum coffee maker. It's not much different from the first time I did this. I included a clock and the shot is a little tighter. I didn't stir the top chamber this time.
I shot one frame every second and play them back at a rate of 30 frames per second. Not much more to say about this one.
As usual, HD and full screen help if your connection is fast enough.
We have a very pretty weed, the Bermuda buttercup oxalis, show up every winter here in Southern California. I've shown the world some in What's Up, Chuck?
One of the interesting things about their flowers is that they open when the sun shines on them and they close when they're not getting much light.
I made a movie of a patch of oxalises that are near a large ash tree. The video starts before the sun rises and ends six and a half hours later after the ash shades the flowers. The flowers start tightly shut, they open then close up.
I had my intervalometer set to take a picture every two minutes. I think I should have used a shorter interval. The frames are played back at a rate of 15 frames per second. The six and a half hours are compressed into just 13 seconds.
There was a breeze for much of the time so the flowers jitter a bit but their opening and closing shows up pretty well.
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