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.)