I stopped by one of the orchards I’m providing drying services for at about 2:30 PM this afternoon. A refrigerated tractor-trailer truck full of cherries was just pulling out. The grower was there, and he looked very cheerful. He told me I was too late; they start picking at 4:30 AM and finish for the day by 1:30 PM.

We talked for a while about the cherries and how they grow. He said the harvest was heavy this year and that he had about 3 times as many cherries as he’d harvested last year. He also said his cherries were, for the most part, nice and fat and that the buyers were going to love them.

He showed me how cherries have to be picked — by the stem to prevent them from going bad too quickly. He pulled a big fat bing off a nearby tree to demonstrate and handed it to me. It was beautiful.

We also talked about my flying. I’d flown over his orchard twice during our three-week contract and I wanted to make sure I’d done it the way he expected. I tend to fly a little low at times and I wanted to make sure I didn’t damage the cherries. Bings are pretty sturdy — he tried to find some blemishes on the one he’d picked for me but couldn’t. He said that when they’re really good and red, you can’t really see any damage. He said the wind damages them just as much as the helicopter most times.

He and his pickers had begun picking on Thursday. He’s got 30 acres of mostly mature cherry trees and expects to be done picking on Monday. That’s when my contract with him ends.

He invited me to come back earlier tomorrow to watch them pick and then process the cherries. He has some kind of cooling bin that brings the fruit temperature down near freezing before putting them into the truck. He says this keeps them fresher longer. He also promised to give me some cherries to take with me tomorrow.

I took a few photos in the orchard before leaving.

And, of course, I ate that big, beautiful cherry.

I made this photo of our dog, Jack, up at Howard Mesa a few weeks ago. Mike and I had gone for a walk with him along one of the dirt roads on the mesa top. As we walked, a storm was coming in. The clouds looked menacing overhead. I used a wide-angle lens (16mm) to add the distortion you see here, hoping for a kind of surreal effect. Not sure if I achieved it, but this is one of my favorite pictures of Jack the Dog.

Juvenile Robin captured at f/5.6, 1/30 second, ISO 400 with 300mm lens.

Let me start again with this disclaimer: I am not a professional photographer. I am a relatively serious amateur who happens to have a bit of extra cash now and then to invest in decent quality — but not professional grade — camera equipment.

Yet I made all three of the bird photos in this blog post and a bunch of others I’m pretty proud of.

I believe in simplicity when doing photography. I don’t like to carry around a lot of stuff. I feel that the more crap you carry around and have to juggle to get the shot, the less likely you are to capture the fleeting images that we see — and miss — every day. And there’s nothing more fleeting than wildlife, especially birds and insects.

After yesterday’s impromptu shoot from my camper — when I went outside barefoot in an attempt to photograph a killdeer mother and her three chicks — I realized that there are only three pieces of equipment a serious amateur wildlife photographer needs:

• 

  A decent quality digital SLR. Mine is a Nikon D80. It’s two years old and it does what I need it to do. My husband just got a D90 and it looks like another good option. Some folks like Canon equipment. That’s supposed to be very good, too. (My favorite point-and-shoots were always tiny Canon PowerShots — but they’re really not appropriate for serious photography.) The important thing is that it offers all the features of an SLR camera, including various modes so you can shoot with aperture or shutter speed priority, with manual settings, or using the camera’s built-in programming. And, of course, it needs to support interchangeable lenses.

• 

  A good fixed focal length or zoom telephoto lens. I’m talking 300mm or better here. I have a Nikkor 70-300mm f4.5/5.6 ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom Lens. This is not a cheap lens; don’t get suckered in to buying the cheaper version of this — or any other lens — if you can afford the better lens. AF stands for autofocus, which I actually need, as my vision deteriorates. VR stands for vibration reduction. There’s some kind of a motor inside the lens that kicks in to steady the image when needed — usually when I zoom in to 300mm. If you’re an old film photographer, keep in mind that most digital cameras, for reasons I’m not 100% clear on, have different focal length equivalents from your old film camera. On my Nikon, it’s a 1.5 ratio. That means a 300mm lens on my Nikon D80 is equivalent to a 450mm lens on my old Nikon 6006. That’s a lot of magnification.

• 

  A good quality monopod. Yes, a tripod would be steadier, but I simply cannot capture those fleeting moments when I’m fiddling with a tripod head to get my camera set up right. I know because I tried my tripod first yesterday. I got fed up within 60 seconds and switched to the monopod. My monopod is a Manfrotto 679B with three sections. It has a foam grip and rubber foot and makes an excellent walking stick for hiking. I bought it over a year ago and didn’t use it for six months. I tried using it with video and it wasn’t steady enough for me. But it’s perfect for still photos using that big zoom lens.

Now put the lens on the camera and the camera on the monopod. Resist the urge to take along any other lenses or equipment. Go to a place where you know there will be wildlife. Extend the leg of your monopod so the camera is about level with your face. Be quiet. Wait. When the wildlife comes, point and shoot.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know I’m living in a trailer parked in the small RV park at a golf course. Every night they water the lawn between the sites. Every morning and evening the birds come out to pick in the grass for worms and other goodies.

There’s a family of killdeer that absolutely taunts me. I see them from my window every day: a mom and three chicks. The chicks are adorable; miniature versions of the mom. I’ve been trying to photograph them for days, but they’re extremely skittish and run off across the parking lot as soon as they see me.

Juvenile Robin, captured at f/5.6, 1/60 second, ISO 400 with a 300mm lens.

I tried again yesterday. When they ran off, I set my sights (and lens) on a number of baby robins. The photos in this blog post are the result. I used the equipment listed here. The camera was set to program mode. No flash (of course).

I shot 79 photos in the span of about 30 minutes. I never ventured farther away from my camper than 150 feet. I couldn’t; I was barefoot! (Next time I’ll remember to throw on a pair of shoes.) I was shooting two juvenile robins at the base of a tree when they suddenly flew up into the tree. They perched on low branches well within reach of my lens. I got many good shots of them but I think these are among the best. The other shot was taken a bit later when a mother bird came to drink and bathe at a puddle near her “baby.”

Mother robin showing her baby how to bathe, captured at f/5.6, 1/400 second, ISO 400 with a 300mm lens.

The two bird close-ups are full-frame photos — not cropped at all. The photo of the mom and her baby is cropped; I discovered that when you get too close to a robin and her young, the robin will fly off, leaving the baby behind. So I kept my distance for this shot to include both of them.

Anyway, the point of all this is to remind photographers that they don’t need a lot of fancy equipment to get good wildlife photos. What’s more important is having quality equipment, some kind of steadying platform for the camera, and patience. Go where the wildlife will be. Wait. If you can get into a kind of hidden position, great.

I’m sure I’ll be repeating this exercise again soon. I still need to capture those elusive killdeer.

This afternoon, while looking through some photos to send to an editor, I stumbled upon one I’d forgotten all about. This isn’t a great photo, but it’s a cool photo. The kind of photo I want to share with others. It doesn’t show off my photography skills, but it tells a story all by itself.

I realized that I had a lot of photos like this. Photos that weren’t good enough to make it into my Photo Gallery but were certainly worth sharing. So I figured I’d create a new meme for them in my blog: Found Photos. I’m hoping to fill it with the kind of fun photos we all have but hesitate to share because they’re not quite “perfect.”

The first photo in the series, Wheat Harvest, is a good example:

I must have geotagged the photos I shot that day; iPhoto provided this location information.

I shot this image through the plexiglas window on my friend Jim’s helicopter. We were flying from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho to Chelan, Washington. It was late afternoon. Jim was at the controls and I was shooting photos. When we came upon these combines, our flight turned into an impromptu photo shoot, with Jim swooping around to put my into position to get the shots. One of the shots, “Combine in Action,” ended up in my Photo Gallery. But this one seemed too goofy to include. After all, it includes the helicopter shadow and everyone knows that you don’t want your shadow in your photos.

Or do you? This is kind of fun, isn’t it? Seeing the helicopter’s shadow on the ground with the two combines? All going the same way?

The picture has problems. Focus is off and the horizon, which I probably should have excluded, is not level. I think it also shows the curvature introduced by the camera’s 28mm wide-angle lens. I could have done better if the door was off and I was trying a little harder. But we were just having fun and I think this picture shows that.

I’m back in Washington and so is Jim. Last year, we promised to take turns flying and shooting photos. Before the end of July, I’ll remind him of our promise and get some new photos from the front passenger seat in his helicopter.

I set this one up on the spur of the moment yesterday afternoon. I happened to look up and see some small, low, wispy clouds moving and shaping themselves in the sky. I had no afternoon plans, so I set up the camera with the snapshot interval set at one shot every 10 seconds.

I let it run for about 3-1/2 hours. During that time, a storm came through, dumping water on the campsite. It was fortunate that I had the camera under the awning and odd that it was pointed away from the storm clouds. The only evidence of rain is some blurriness in a few shots; I wiped it away between exposures.

I assembled the 1700+ images at 15 frames per second. This is the result.

I’m going to repeat this exercise later in the week for a longer period of time with a larger image. Someone on Viddler said it would make a great screen saver; it would be neat to make a movie large enough to fill a screen.

It would also be neat to set this to some kind of new age music.

Yesterday, I tried my hand with another time-lapse, this one involving people. I set up my camera near the base of some trees on the edge of the putting green area of the Colockum Ridge Golf Course and zoomed in a tiny bit on the pro shop, golf cart, and RV park area. I got it all started at around 6:15 AM, with one shot every 15 seconds. I let it run until about 4:20 PM — just over 10 hours. I assembled the movie two ways: 15 frames per second and 30 frames per second. I liked the shorter movie (30 fps). I used Stomp to crop the frame to 16:9 ratio as I compressed the movie, thus cutting out a bunch of boring grass and a little bit of the sky.

Here’s the final product:

Tuesday is men’s league day at the course, so I knew there would be a considerable crowd in mid-morning. I think it’s interesting to watch how the scene changes throughout the day. You gotta love the people jumping around in the frames. You can see my new neighbors arrive in the RV park — they had a heck of a time parking those big rigs in the relatively narrow parking spaces here. (I did much better when I arrived.) Did you see the birds walking all over the putting green early in the morning? And what was that that seemed to fly into the camera?

My thanks to the folks at the Colockum Ridge Golf Course. Do you golf? Have an RV? Know where Quincy, WA is? If you answered all of those questions, you have no excuse not to visit one day soon!

The other afternoon, I drove down to Quincy Lakes with my Nikon D80 camera, 70-300 mm VR lens, and monopod. It was a scouting expedition for me. I’d spent a lot of time down at Quincy Lakes in the summer of 2008, photographing birds. This was my first visit in 2009. Although I brought my camera along, I wasn’t really expecting to take many photos. I was more interested in finding “good spots” to set up a tripod for some serious photography.

Of course, once I got down there and saw the incredible variety of colorful birds, I couldn’t stop myself from shooting away. I’d park the truck and hike a bit of a distance away from it, plant the foot of my monopod in the dirt, and target a bird. Most of the red-winged blackbirds and yellow-headed blackbirds I saw, however, were clinging to tall reeds, with other tall reeds blocking my view. I shot a lot of photos, but knew that only a small percentage of them would be any good. I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to do any better with a tripod.

After about 90 minutes and eight or so stops and short hikes, I was tired and ready to go back and review what I’d shot. But I detoured down a road to check out the camping area. If Mike comes up to Washington to join me later in the season, we might pull the trailer over there for a few days of camping on a lake.

I was just driving away from the parking area when I spotted a yellow-headed blackbird clinging to some reeds on the side of the road. The bird was less than 15 feet away from the roadside. I pulled up abeam him as quietly as I could in a diesel pickup truck and pressed the brake to stop. For a moment, I just looked at the bird and he looked at me. My camera was still attached to my monopod; its leg was almost fully extended. If I opened the door to step out or swung the leg around outside my window, the bird would surely fly off. In fact, I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t already flown off.

Yes, I shot this photo from the window of my truck.

With my foot still on the brake and the truck stopped squarely in the middle of the narrow dirt road, I reached over and began to unscrew the camera from the monopod’s very basic swivel head. Every once in a while, I’d glance back at the bird. He remained in place. I finally got the camera free, zoomed it to 300 mm, and focused. I squeezed off about a dozen shots before the bird flew off.

This is the best one. It is not cropped.

I don’t know about you, but I find this incredibly ironic. We gear up and go out with multiple lenses and filters and tripods. We hike away from roads and vehicles and people. We bushwhack off trails and wade into streams.

And yet it’s possible to take a photo as nice as this without leaving the vehicle.

Hell, I think I even had the stereo on.

It pays to cruise around with the windows rolled down, I guess.

About two weeks ago, I got the bright idea that it was a complete waste of valuable camera resources to use my Nikon D80 for time-lapse photography when I had an older camera I could use. The other camera is my Canon PowerShot G5, which I bought back in 2003 for aerial photography work.

Buying the camera was a huge deal back then. Digital SLRs, if available back then, were too expensive to be an option. The G5 offered 5.0 megapixel (!) resolution — more than twice the resolution of any other digital camera we had. But it also included features we needed, including manual setting for focus and exposure.

Looking at the camera today, it’s amazingly big and clunky. But it takes a decent picture — certainly good enough for my time-lapse experiments. And frankly, I was having trouble getting my mind around leaving my Nikon outdoors, unattended, for hours at a time. It could be because the tripod got knocked over once and it was sheer luck that it fell toward a rail that caught it rather than toward the empty concrete behind it. I had no love for the G5; if it broke, well, that’s the way it goes. Ditto if it got stolen. In fact, I’d be more upset about losing my tripod or Pclix than the G5.

Oddly enough, the G5 has a built-in intervalometer — a fact I was unaware of. Unfortunately, the interval must be set in minutes (1 to 60) and it can only take 100 shots at a time. This simply wasn’t going to cut it for my needs. Besides, for some reason I still can’t understand, I can’t get the damn thing to work.

So I bought an optical cable for my Pclix. It arrived right before I left for Washington. I tried it for the first time on Friday.

For the optical cable to work, its end must be taped to the camera. The Pclix maker recommends electrical tape, so that’s what I used. Unfortunately, the heat of the day softened the tape. After about 2-1/2 hours, it shifted out of position. The camera stopped taking pictures. Here’s the result, with most of the beginning edited out (since there was really nothing going on):

Disappointing in so many ways. The sky was just getting interesting when the setup failed. And let’s face it — the view of the golf cart shed isn’t all that enticing.

So I tried again yesterday after recharging the camera’s battery overnight. I fixed up the camera differently and pointed it north instead of west. Same settings: one shot every minute, compiled into a movie at 10 frames per second. To prevent the camera battery from running out, I turned off the camera’s video screen. First shot at 9:13 AM; last shot at 7:33 PM. I left the camera outside all day long — even while I was out doing a helicopter ride. I never would have done that with my Nikon.

The result isn’t bad at all. I’m a little POed at myself for including the wires in the shot and it’s a little weird that some of the larger vehicles that drove by appeared in some shots — like the hay truck near the beginning! Again, I think I could have done better. But the clouds are so awesome in this movie. They build and move and swirl around. So cool. See for yourself:

I’ll keep working on this. Hopefully, I’ll get it right soon.

I’m living in my camper on a golf course south of Quincy, WA. The golf course is in the middle of farmland. In fact, the golf course used to be a farm field. The irrigation circle (or semi-circle) is still used to water the fairways. Because of this, all of the trees in the middle of the course are very short.

It’s a weird setup.

Last year when I was here, I took walks with my camera quite often. (You can find some of my better photos in my Photo Gallery; click here for a slide show of my Washington shots.) I’m trying to get into the habit of doing that again. I walk along the edge of the golf course property. There’s a canal on the south side with rushing water. On the other side of the canal, there was a wheat field.

This year, it’s alfalfa.

I was surprised to see the change. The alfalfa was freshly cut — no more than a day or two ago. They cut in the shape of the irrigation circle (or semi-circle). It was difficult to get a good shot at the curves.

The alfalfa will be left to dry in the field for a week or so. Then they’ll drive through with a baler and gather it up into bales that are dropped on the field. Later, another piece of equipment will come by and gather up the bales. They’ll be transported somewhere and covered with tarps until sold or used.

Last year, I didn’t start walking around the golf course until late June or July. I suspect that they’ll plant wheat in the field when the alfalfa has been taken away. I’m not sure if it’s too late to plant that — other fields already have wheat crops that are quite tall.

But I’ll observe and learn and maybe report back here.

The clouds were set up in the northeastern sky for an interesting sunrise when I woke up before dawn (again) this morning. So I set up my camera to record a time-lapse of the sunrise on the clouds. Settings: 1 shot every 10 seconds, made into a movie at 15 frames per second.

Caught an unexpected feature near the end.

But the good part about all this is that it’s encouraging me to keep moving.

I created this time-lapse today, while cleaning my office. Here are the before and after images; as you can see, it really needed some work.

This is what I had to clean.

This is what it looked like when I was done.

Ready for the action? Here it is. The formula: one shot at f22.0 (which explains the blur) every 30 seconds, put together in a 10 frames per second video. The lens used is a 10.5mm fisheye. Be sure to check out my dog.

This is too much fun.

I really feel almost addicted to making these movies. I know they’re not really any good, but I think they’re interesting (at least). And they’re helping me to understand how to create time-lapse movies, what works, and what doesn’t work.

Yesterday afternoon, I set up my camera and time-lapse equipment on the upstairs patio of my house, pointing at the sunset. Then I let it go, shooting one image every 20 seconds. It was nearly 11 PM when I turned it off. By that time, the crescent moon had set, too.

The resulting video included a lot of blank sky. My exposure was not lengthy enough to capture the stars after sunset, although one very bright star does set with the moon when it finally makes its appearance. I cut the video into two pieces: sunset and moonset. Here they are.

Sunset Time-Lapse

It was a pretty good afternoon for shooting the sunset. In Arizona, we don’t get clouds very often — although this year, our annual monsoon may be starting early. Yesterday afternoon, there were a lot of clouds out to the west — enough to completely filter the sun and give it something to paint with color as it set.

I should mention here that this is the same sky you can see in the time-lapse I did earlier in the day of the saguaro flowers. I just moved the camera upstairs and excluded anything other that the sky (and a tiny bit of a distant tree — darn it!). The only thing I wish is that I’d begun the time-lapse before the sun entered the camera’s frame. I think it would have been more interesting to see it drift in and then set.

I also need to point out that this video (and the one with the cactus flowers) really illustrates what I find attractive about time-lapse photography. It isn’t showing us anything we can’t see on our own. But it’s speeding up the process, making it possible to see motion where we normally wouldn’t. For example, this video is 20 seconds long. I created it using images spaced 20 seconds apart, then put them together in a 15 frames per second video. Do the math: 15 x 20 x 20 = 6000 seconds of real time. That’s 100 minutes. Would you sit still for 1 hour and 40 minutes to watch a sunset? And, if you did, would you see the clouds and sun moving as they clearly are in the video?

Moonset Time-Lapse

I cut out all the boring black night sky to produce this short video of the setting crescent moon. Not terribly exciting, I’m afraid.

One of the things I learned here is to set the exposure manually so all shots are the same. Let’s face it — the brightness of the image shouldn’t change. One exposure should do the trick. If I’d made a longer exposure, I would have had a brighter moon and more stars. And if I’d fixed the exposure to be the same for every shot, the brightness of the moon wouldn’t change from one shot to the next. (I sure hope some more knowledgeable photographers out there will correct me if I’m wrong on this.)

What Do You Think?

I’d love to get your feedback about my time-lapse mania. Are you enjoying them as much as I am? Am I wasting my time? Do you have any specific topics you’d like to see in time-lapse? Use the Comments link for this post or any of the other time-lapse posts to let me know.

I’m really liking this high-quality time-lapse movie creation. It’s fun. Best of all, I can set it up to do a job while I’m home and check the results later.

Today’s experiment came out better than expected. The main goal was to create a time-lapse movie of today’s saguaro flowers closing. (The flowers of the saguaro cactus bloom at night and are wilted and closed by late afternoon.) But I set up the camera to include the sky beyond, which was just filling with clouds. The building clouds stole the show.

If you think this looks good, you should see it in full quality at 1936 x 1296 pixels. That’s the lowest resolution my Nikon D80 can deliver, so that’s how I bring it into QuickTime.

I shut it down when I did for a few reasons:

• The camera’s battery was almost depleted. It had snapped 621 images 20 seconds apart.
• The wind was kicking up. I worried that a gust could knock over the camera and tripod and damage my camera on the concrete surface of my back patio.
• The sun had moved above and behind the cactus. That wasn’t the best lighting for the flowers.
• The flowers were just about fully closed.

I’m recharging the battery now. If the clouds dissipate a bit, I may relocate the camera to my upstairs patio and attempt a sunset time-lapse.

If you’re new to this blog or have stumbled onto this page and wonder what the heck this is all about, read “Time-Lapse Mania” to learn more.

Just thought I’d take a moment to share this photo with blog readers. It was taken by Bryan using my Nikon D80 and 10.5mm fisheye lens. He was sitting in the back seat; I was sitting up front with Ryan at the controls. Bryan snapped this shot from between the two seats as we were flying over Lake Shasta in northern California.

Yes, I know we look a bit distorted. That’s the lens in action. But can you get an idea of the view? Huge front bubble window, big side windows. Even the back seats have a great view.

Yet people still take tours of places like the Grand Canyon in airplanes, where they’re lucky to get a limited view out one window.

Go figure.

Let me start by saying that I have always been fascinated by time-lapse photography. There’s something about watching scenes in jittery fast motion that really makes me sit up and take notice.

I’ve played around with time-lapse photography on and off for years. When I had a Webcam, it was easy. The software I used — Evocam, most recently — could handle the creation of the movies automatically. It could also archive them. I’d review a few of the more interesting ones and put them in a blog entry. The best ones were always during Arizona’s summer monsoon, when clouds grew quickly and flew across the sky. You can see other examples here, here, and here.

I also did a slightly more interesting time-lapse movie of a garage shelf assembly project. In that case, I just put my laptop in the garage, pointed the built-in camera in the area where we were working, and let Evocam do the rest. I was rather pleased with the results.

A week or two ago, one of my Twitter friends — I believe it was SeeTTL — tweeted a link to a video called Eclectic 3.0. I watched it in fascination. Not only was this incredible time-lapse photography set to music, but many of the scenes appeared to use tilt-shift lenses (or tilt-shift faking techniques). Have you seen it yet? Check it out now. I’ll wait.

When I realized that 3.0 meant it was photographer Ross Ching’s third effort, I wasted no time tracking down the original Eclectic and Eclectic 2.0. I then downloaded the highest quality available for each video and watched them again, in order. It was interesting to me to see how Ross’s style and technique changed. Eclectic was pretty basic and mostly local. Eclectic 2.0 added panning and more exotic locations. Eclectic 3.0 added tilt-shift to many scenes, most of which were places I go to several times a year (Monument Valley, Lake Powell, Sedona, etc.).

Ross’s work is a far cry from my primitive explorations of time-lapse photography. It’s art, photography, and real cinematography, all rolled into one. Ross’s work is probably the best examples of entertaining time-lapse photography out there. It’s a true pleasure to watch — even if you’re not a time-lapse lover like me.

And I think Ross’s work does a great job of making me understand what it is that I like about time-lapse photography. Watch any scene where the world changes around the camera. Sure, you could sit in the same spot for hours and see the same thing. But would you? Tiny minute-to-minute changes, like the shadow of a tree or canyon wall are accelerated, made more visible by the sheer speed of the action in time-lapse. All this is going on as the camera sits tirelessly, recording periodic images. But it’s only by assembling these images into a movie that we can see what the camera saw and appreciate how the little changes make big changes.

Anyway, Ross was kind enough to provide a movie called The Making of Eclectic 2.0. I downloaded and watched that, too. Twice. It gave me enough information to upgrade my pitiful time-lapse setup — junky Webcams that required a computer to trigger the snapshots — to something that could generate better quality movies.

A Pclix.

The key ingredient (for me) was a Pclix combination intervalometer and shutter triggering device. Although a bit pricey — with a Nikon D80-compatible cable and shipping, it cost me $190 — this device makes it easy to set up my camera to automatically take shots at intervals I specify. The basic programming is easy, with two dials to set the interval time. More complex programming is also possible — including setting the amount of time the camera should wait before starting or the total number of shots it should take — but a bit more complex. (I agree with what some forum commenters said about programming difficulty.) But it’s small, lightweight, and effective.

I didn’t waste any time trying it out. For this first experiment, I set the camera up on a tripod on my upstairs back patio, looking west. I wanted to capture the movement of the stars and any airplanes, as well as my neighbor’s lights going out as the night wore on. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?), the camera battery ran out. (It was low when I started; should have charged it first.) But I don’t think it’s bad for a first effort.

The second effort focused on one of my backyard trees. I filled the feeder with food and turned on the sprinkler for a while. Then we went out. I had the Pclix set for one shot every 40 seconds and let it run for about 7 hours. This is part of the movie. I really can’t see subjecting anyone to more of the same. To say it’s boring is an understatement. It could cure insomnia. Check this tidbit for yourself and let me know if you agree.

I did another time-lapse experiment this afternoon. I put my 10.5mm fisheye lens on the camera and set it up on a tripod on a countertop in the corner of my kitchen. I set the f-stop to 22 to maximize depth of field and get most of the scene in focus. The resulting shutter speed was slow, which is great because it blurred some of the motion, giving it a more dynamic feel. I set up the Pclix for one shot every 20 seconds, then went about tidying up. You can see me, Jack the Dog (inside and out), and Alex the Bird (in his cage). I cleared most of the junk off my kitchen table and organized my camera equipment (except for the camera, which was busy) for my trip to Washington state later this month.

Tomorrow morning, I’m going to try for clouds. This morning had some excellent light clouds at dawn; if I get the same effect tomorrow, it’ll make a nice, short time-lapse.

What’s cool about all this is that every frame of these movies is a high-quality image. Yes, I do shoot at a lower resolution than normal — 2.5 megapixels (1936 x 1296) rather than 10 megapixels (3872 x 2592) — but each image is a photograph, not a frame in a video movie. So I can back out of a movie and grab a single high-quality image.

Anyway, I hope to do some better work in the future. I’ve been inspired by a master.