The Drinking Bird

I spent another 6 hours running a time lapse trying to catch a peony blooming. I've come to the conclusion that these things are just too darned slow. From bud to complete bloom takes about three days. I'm patient, but have my limits.

So I went out tonight to do a time lapse of the sunset. They clouds had been interesting all day and I though it'd be a good time to try. However, by the time sunset started to come around, all the clouds in the west had broken up. Luckily, there was a storm off to the east that was just starting to break up, and the light had that "magic hour" look to it. So I did a series of this storm breaking up with part of one of the local wind farms in the foreground. I'm still working on my technique, so there's some rough spots where I haven't quite gotten the gist of time lapse camera moves down. But I think this one came out pretty good.

The video below covers a period of about three hours. Images were taken in six second increments, allowing the software to choose the exposure. There's a little bit of everything going on, and I think it makes for a pretty interesting video, although the amount of loss due to compression takes something away. I'd upload an uncompressed version, but at 1600 X 1200, it violates You Tube's size constraints. It's also been sized to fit the blog format, so if you click on the video and go to You Tube, you can see a larger version.

Enjoy...

I decided to try to catch one of my peonies blooming using time lapse techniques. Well, a good idea in and of itself, but have you ever really though about how long it takes for a flower to bloom? It never seems to take long when you're paying attention, but boy, these things are slower than molasses. I pick a nice big bud that appeared to be getting ready to open. I ran the camera for about four hours and the thing didn't budge. In fact, it still hadn't opened the next day I went out.

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Oprah, for some reason I don't understand, wields a great deal of influence with the public. People listen to, and do what she says. Unfortunately, she has always been on the side of woo, but now seems to have stepped over a line she should not have crossed. She's giving anti-vaccination mouthpiece Jenny McCarthy an even bigger venue to spew her special kind of nonsense.

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Ok, so time lapse of me working in my back yard might not be fine art, but it's certainly better than some crap that passes for it. My experiments might not pass for something as good as my niece's work, but I think it neat to mess around with. This one shows me cutting out some overgrown shrubs in my back yard and cooking dinner. I only wish I had more than one camera I could do this with so I could set this one up and leave it alone for two months.

I wish I had thought to turn the camera so the whole project could be seen from the beginning. At least the next time, all the work will be in the same frame.

Like one of yesterday's, this video was shot with my Canon A510 point & shoot digital, using GB Timelapse software, one exposure every 6 seconds at the camera's lowest setting (640 X 480).

I'm experimenting a little with doing some time-lapse photography. I first got the idea that I'd like to take, I don't know, and image an hour for two months of my back yard and garden to compress the garden's growth and any work that gets done over the summer into a couple minutes of video.

Originally, I was just going to use an old laptop and web cam to do this. I could leave the web cam outside and if it got ruined, who cares? Then I found some software called GB Timelapse, that allows me to control my Canon Powershot A510 from the laptop. This allows for a wider angle and a much better quality. So, I'm trying both. Below, you can see the results of an afternoon and evenings' worth of exposures on both the A510 and the webcam. The biggest difference, aside from the resolution, is that the web cam is firing every 10 seconds, and the A510 is firing every 30 seconds. I'm trying to play around a little with the exposure times balancing that with how much disk space they use. I've got a terrabyte array, so I should be good unless I crank the resolution on the digicam all the way up.

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