My helicopter’s annual inspection was started yesterday. My old Robinson mechanic from Prescott came down with a knowledgeable assistant to do the job in my Wickenburg hangar.

Just for fun, I set up my old Canon G5 camera on a tripod with my Pclix timer and created a time-lapse movie of the job. The shots were taken 30 seconds apart and then compiled into a movie at 6 frames per second. Here’s the resulting movie:

Kind of fun, huh?

For those who aren’t familiar with the inspection requirements for aircraft in the U.S., here’s a quick summary:

• Every year, the aircraft is required to have an annual inspection. This inspection requires an A&P mechanic to remove various panels and inspect parts normally hidden from view. It also includes an oil change, various filter changes, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s a calendar-based inspection.
• Commercially operated aircraft are also required to have 100-hour inspections. These are virtually the same as annual inspections — in fact, its common for aircraft owners to substitute an annual inspection for a 100-hour inspection if it doesn’t appear that they will fly another 100 hours before the annual inspection is due. My helicopters have always been operated commercially, so I’ve always gotten these inspections.
• Other time-based inspections or maintenance. These are things like oil changes (every 25 or 50 hours), magneto inspections/rebuilds (every 300 hours), gearbox oil changes, belt changes, avionics tests, etc.

The cost of an inspection or maintenance item varies depending on the age and condition of the aircraft, the type of inspection, and the mechanic’s knowledge and ability to get the job done quickly but thoroughly. The cost of an inspection can also rise considerably if the mechanic actually finds something that needs attention.

If you read about my trip to the Parker 425 this year, you may recall a certain incident involving an unbuckled seatbelt. I thought the problem was simply cosmetic — a job for a paint shop. But my mechanic believes it might be beyond just cosmetic. He thinks a few of the tiny dents may have compromised the integrity of the fuel tank behind those dents.

Keep in mind that I’ve flown the helicopter at least 6 hours since the event. No fuel leaks, no indication of a problem. The fuel tanks are nearly full right now — and have been full three times since then. No leaks.

But that doesn’t mean the dinged tank might not develop a crack or a leak. At least that’s what I’ve been told.

A new one from the factory will cost $3,700. Plus paint. Plus installation.

Take my advice: be a pilot but not an owner.

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.

NOW I can get back to work!

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.

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.

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.

My friend Tom took a great photo of the storm cloud that passed through Wickenburg yesterday. I thought it might be interesting to see a timelapse for the same day:

Remember, after clicking this image, you may have to wait a few seconds for it to load before it starts playing. Be patient and click only once. It’ll play right in this window. QuickTime is required.

I live to the west of Tom (that’s to the left in this photo) about a mile away. Although you can see the storm clouds moving in in this timelapse, the view is different: Tom was looking northwest; my view is northeast.

Want More?

If you’re really into these timelapse images, you can download the entire set for July: 18 QuickTime movies in a 20.6 MB ZIP file.

Or you can do what a few folks at wickenburg-az.com have done: get on my e-mail list for a daily distribution of the day’s timelapse movie, mailed at at about 8 PM MST each evening. The distribution list is only used for the automated distribution of these timelapses, so don’t worry about spam. To get on the list, contact me. To get off the list, just reply to one of the distribution messages and let me know that you’ve had enough.

We spent most of yesterday driving around back roads in the Bradshaw Mountains, escaping the heat. There were isolated T-storms up there and we got drizzled on, but not seriously wet.

At home, the WebCam did its job and captured the local sky cover. Although it was only partly cloudy in Wickenburg when we returned home at 4:30 PM, the clouds moved in quickly. We had a rainbow (not captured on the video) just before sunset and could clearly hear thunder and see lightning.

But no rain.

Here’s the timelapse for the day:

Remember, after clicking this image, you may have to wait a few seconds for it to load before it starts playing. Be patient and click only once. It’ll play right in this window. QuickTime is required.

I’ve got higher hopes for today since storm clouds are already close at 1:18 PM. Radar shows them moving southwest; there’s a slight chance they might pass just northwest of us. I hope not. I’m ready for a good storm.

One of the most popular features of my local-interest Web site, wickenburg-az.com, is its WebCam. It’s not just popular. It’s popular enough that people actually donate money to keep it up and running.

The WebCam on the site has a long and varied history that you can read about there. About six months ago, I bought a new camera that was compatible with my system and set it up. Although I wasn’t completely satisfied with the quality of the image, it seemed good enough. It’s hard to spend a lot of money on a camera that just sits on the windowsill, taking photos of the trees and mountains and sky all day and night long for months on end. The camera I wound up with was a Logitech, which cost less than $100.

I guess you get what you pay for because within six months, the image the camera was sending to the computer had seriously degraded. It didn’t seem focused and had a yellowish tinge. When I repositioned it, I realized that the saguaro cactus that gives the WebCam its name had “burned in” to the camera. The situation came to a head when I attempted to show some work being done in the park that’s visible from that window and the resulting image was so poor I was embarrassed to share it.

Time for a new camera.

I wound up buying a D-Link wireless Internet camera for $119. This is an interesting device. It has its own built-in Web server, so once you get it plugged into power, accessible to a wireless network, and configured, it can serve its own live moving images over the Web. All you need to do is punch in the correct IP address.

I had some trouble configuring it, primarily because my network is a bit non-standard. (Apple AirPort wireless base station, Ethernet hub connecting one Mac with the laser printer and the Windows PC, etc.) I thought I’d have to install the wireless card I’d bought for my PC months ago to get it on the network and use it to install the software, so I did. I’d been putting it off, expecting the process to be a nightmare, but it actually went quite smoothly, with true plug-and-play connectivity. (There is hope for PCs.) But the PC wouldn’t talk to the camera and the only software available was PC based. So I wound up having to call D-Link for help. It was a toll-free number and I only waited about 10 minutes on hold. The guy that answered knew most of what I had to do to get my Mac to talk to the camera. I knew the rest so, between the two of us, we had it working within about five minutes. I came away from the experience with a lot of respect for D-Link and feel very comfortable about recommending their products.

I also had to tweak my AirPort base station settings so a certain port would be mapped to the camera’s IP address. My single static IP address is shared by multiple computers. The base station acts as a router to route incoming requests to the correct computer or, in this case, other device. It sounds complex, but it really isn’t. After all, I can do it and I’m not much of a network geek.

The camera’s live image can be viewed from any Java-capable browser by visiting http://66.218.237.73:81/Jview.htm and entering a user ID of visitor (leave the password field empty). Because the camera is wireless, I was able to put it in any room of my office, so I put it on the other side of the building, looking out over North Tegner Street toward the center of town. The image, during the day, is nice and clear. The moving video is a bit jerky — I don’t have a T1 connection here, after all — but it’s cool.

Today, if I find time, I’m going to rig up the WebCam software that runs on my Web server so it accesses this image and puts it on the site’s home page. I’m also going to build some kind of protective box for the camera so I can mount it outside. This will prevent glare that appears at certain times of the day due to the double-pane glass window the camera has to “look” through.

In the meantime, I’ve gotten nearly enough recent donations to pay for the new camera. So I’m probably going to buy another one and mount that in the front room to replace the current image from the Logitech camera. Hopefully, donations will pay for that one, too.

Then I’ll adjust the Logitech camera’s image to look down into the parking lot. Sadly, my next door neighbor’s 20-year-old son, who was murdered, was last seen in this parking lot getting into a car. If my camera had been looking down, it may have caught information about the car in the camera’s archives (it creates a time-lapse movie every day). So even a bad image is better than no image when it comes to gathering information about what goes on in the parking lot.

I’m also actively looking for people who want to host WebCams on their computers for use on wickenburg-az.com. One of the complaints I’ve gotten is that the camera doesn’t show anything “interesting.” Well, my office isn’t in the middle of town, so there’s not much I can do about that. But other people with more interesting views might want to share them with site visitors. I’m hoping a few hobbyists step forward so I can help set them up.

When I find lots of time, I’ll probably write an article about my work with the D-Link, just in case any other Mac user wants to try one out. It’s proof that a Mac can even deal with a PC-only peripheral.