Traffic

Yesterday we went back to the spot on the Oceanside Pier where I had made some time-lapse videos. It was a hot day so I thought that there would be a lot of people there. By lunchtime there seemed to be room down on the beach for a lot more beach blankets. If you want a spot on the water on a hot day, Oceanside seems to be the place to go. It's easy to get to. We took the Sprinter from Escondido. The pier is just a short walk from the transit center.

I made a couple of videos.

The first isn't terribly successful. The tide was pretty high so there wasn't any beach under the pier. So there aren't many people in front of the camera. And the people setting up their blankets on the beach are pretty far away so they're just dots. And not very dense dots. I really had expected the beach to be wall-to-wall people. Maybe they showed up after lunch.

Here are about two hours and 15 minutes. The shots were taken at 10-second intervals and are played back at a rate of 30 frames per second. I shouldn't have used my fisheye lens. It probably would have been a lot more interesting to aim just at the part of the beach where the sunbathers set up. Maybe next time.


A more interesting video was taken from a spot a little way up the ramp that goes from the street down to the pier. I used my telephoto zoom lens set at the 70mm focal length and pointed it down the length of the pier. We get to see the people going up and down the pier and a lot of traffic out on the water. This video is much more successful.

It was shot at 2-second intervals and played back at 15 frames per second. I let the camera click away for only 18 minutes. I figured that if anybody wants to see more action all they have to do is play it again. Nothing really changes. Occasionally people stop and look over the rail for a while. There are two people near the start of the pier who are there for the whole time and the humanity swirls around them. That's kind of fun.