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.

Follow up:

There isn't much to see in these besides the trees waving in the breeze and a couple of rabbits chasing each other and eating my garden (I'm gonna get those little bastards, yet). The reflections of the clouds moving across the top the grill are kind of interesting. Might have to do something with that...

Here's the video from the Canon A510.

And here is the video done with the Web Cam (it's a Logitech Quickcam 4000):