Not quite as lyrical, is it?

Last year, about this time, I set up a couple cameras pointing at my back yard and garden. My Canon A510 point & shoot digital sitting on a tripod pointing out the door, and a QuickCam web cam sitting outside zip tied to the power meter. I never expected it to last as long as it did.

Both cameras were taking an image once every 6 seconds in the hopes that I could make a time lapse of the whole summer. I know now that that is just way too much data. In the case of the webcam, I ended up with something like 90 thousand images. Together with the two cameras, I had about half a terabyte to sift through.

It never even occurred to me that I wouldn't need images for all 24 hours of the day. In fact, I probably could have gotten away with taking one image a day at noon. GBTimeLapse allows that, so that would have worked with the A510, but Yawcam, which is what was running the webcam, couldn't. I suppose I could have set it to take an image every 86,400 seconds. Oh well...

So this weekend I finally sat down and wrote some vbscript to sort through the images and pick out just the ones I wanted. I started with the A510 data as there wasn't as much of it. I had the script pick out one image per hour between the hours of 7am and 7pm, a good time frame for May-Sept that would be almost guaranteed to be in daylight. I'm trying a different approach with the webcam data that I will post at a later time.

The selected images from the A510 yielded about 1300 images that I assembled into a video using Virtual Dub. This produced 43 seconds of video that covers about four months of real time.

Click the link below to check it out:

Follow up: