Night of the Shooting Stars, Restored version

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!

The Birds II

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."

Hmmmmmmmmmmm!

Born on the Fourth of July

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.

For what it's worth, here's the show.