I went on a drive to Palomar Mountain yesterday. When I was approaching the base of the mountain I realized that a drive up a twisty road might be a good subject for a time-lapse movie. It's a popular spot for guys on their crotch rockets to get a major adrenaline rush. I thought that I might get to record a lot of motorcycles passing me. But it was a sleepy weekday so nary a cycle. And no cars ever caught up to me.
I edited out a lot of the trip. You've seen four or five twists and you've pretty much seen them all. Watch it to the end...it ends well.
I took pictures at 0.7 second intervals and played them back at 15 frames per second. I let the camera decide what exposures to use.
On the way up I realized that I hadn't set the lens to the widest view so it starts out with none of the dashboard in view. That changed along the way.
I spent a night of December 13-14, 2010, watching the Geminid meteor shower and made a time-lapse movie of the event. Read my story of the night here.
I made my movie by setting the camera's sensitivity to ISO 3200 and took 16 second exposures. The intervalometer was set at 17 second intervals. So this is an almost continuous record of the four and a half hours of the night. The pictures are played back at a rate of 15 frames per second.
Things that move are not meteors...they're stars, planes and clouds. Meteors appear in single frames so they're just flashes (just like in real life!).
Before I got to the gorillas and flamingos, I had spent an hour and a half at a spot overlooking the East Africa enclosure (I think) of the Wild Animal Park. I shot three segments of a time-lapse video there.
The first segment ended when I snagged the tripod with the cord of my hat and sent the camera off to a new view.
I set the camera up again and started shooting. After a while all of the animals were leaving the spot I had the camera aimed at. So I tried something new. I loosened the nut that holds the tripod's head panning axis locked. I moved the camera a bit between shots. The panning worked somewhat but a nicer tripod with some sort of fine control of the camera's direction would be nice. I then tried to adjust the zoom of the lens. That failed miserably. The zoom control of the lens is quite stiff so the whole camera rocked and I couldn't adjust it in tiny steps.
I then shot another segment with a wide angle view.
I pasted the three segments together into one minute-and-a-half video.
This was shot at a rate of a frame every three seconds and played back at 24 frames per second.
Flamingos move faster than gorillas but they can still be rather static. Because they do move I shot them at a rate of one frame per second. I played them back at 24 frames per second.
I bumped the camera so there is a bit of a discontinuity around 0:26. At around 0:34 you the flamingos run back onto their island. This is because a keeper entered their area to give them some food. After the keeper left they evacuated the island (around 0:40) to get the food that was just left.
I spent a day at San Diego Zoo Safari Park (formerly called San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park). I took my intervalometer around and made some videos.
One stop, thank you Jerry for the suggestion, was the gorilla's enclosure. Gorillas sit and sit and sit and don't move a lot. A perfect subject for a time-lapse video. Throw in the throngs of people looking at the gorillas and you have a dynamic movie.
I set up my camera under a tree out of the way of the people and aimed it at the large male who was sitting in a cave. It's hard to see him till he comes out into the sun. He's joined by three other gorillas.
Near the end a keeper appears above the enclosure and she throws treats down to the apes. Then the keeper moved to the other end of the enclosure and threw more treats. The gorillas left my end and the video ends.
While I was shooting the gorillas, a little girl wanted to know what I was up to. I told her that I was making a time-lapse movie of the gorillas and would be uploading it to YouTube. She wanted to give me her phone number so I could call her to let her know when the video was there so she could watch it. I thought it wouldn't be a good idea for her to give someone she doesn't know her phone number. I wrote down the keywords that should find the video once it gets posted. I gave that to her mother. I wonder if she'll look at it now that it's available.
I had the camera take a picture every two seconds for 56 minutes starting at 12:18pm, Friday, November 12, 2010. I cut out many frames at the beginning since they showed only the empty enclosure. The big male just couldn't be seen. The shots are played at 24 frames per second.
It was shot at a rate of one frame each five seconds for just over two hours starting at 8:22am, Sunday, October 24, 2010. It's played back at 24 frames per second. I manually set the exposure at f/10 for 1/400th second. The ISO setting was 200.
It was shot at a rate of one frame each five seconds for half an hour starting at 2:17pm, Saturday, October 23, 2010. It's played back at 24 frames per second. I manually set the exposure at f/8 for 1/400th second. The ISO setting was 200. We get to see the scene get darker when there are thicker clouds.
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