We Bought a Zoo

I bought a new gadget.

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.

Turtle: The Incredible Journey

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.

1/27,000^th 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.

The Blob vs. Magneto: Final, Final Smackdown

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.

Flower Drum Song

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.

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.