Yesterday, I spent the entire day cleaning my office. It was a disaster.
This is a time-lapse of the process. I used a 10.5mm fisheye lens to get my whole office in the picture. I shot one frame every 30 seconds, then compiled them at 15 frames per second in QuickTime. The result compresses about 8 hours of time into 1 minute.
One shot every ten seconds, compiled at 30 frames per second.
The forecast called for a 30% chance of rain late in the day yesterday, so I thought I’d set up my time-lapse camera and capture the cloud build-up. This video starts at about 7:20 AM and ends at 7:30 PM, right when it had gotten dark. The first 25 seconds is a typical Arizona day — perfectly blue sky with nothing going on. Then some light clouds chase each other across the sky. Finally, the storm builds and moves in. This is one of my better efforts.
These shots were taken from just outside my front door with the camera pointing almost due north. And no, the cactus isn’t crooked. Its the wide angle lens distorting the shot.
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!
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.
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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 
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