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.

Follow up:

So, I picked another bud that looked closer to opening and I was a little luckier this time. The resulting video is shown below. The total run was about three hours, which have been compressed down to 19 seconds. The biggest problem here is that I'm not doing this in a controlled environment, so I'm having to deal with wind moving the flowers while I'm shooting, hence the jumpy video. I may try again by actually cutting a bloom that's getting ready to open, bringing it in side and putting it in water so I can control the environment. This way, I won't have to worry about someone stealing my laptop and camera when I can't sit outside for 6 hours straight.

Once again, this was done with a Canon Powershot A510, captured using GBTimeLapse and rendered using Virtual Dub

Video is below...enjoy.