One of our orchids, a phalaenopsis, has decided to bloom, despite our growing conditions, so I setup the digicam to record the first flower over 48 hours. If anyone is interested, you can watch the video, but it is quite large, at about 5 megs.
There were some serious lighting issues, especially at night, so I might have another go at it using a flash or with better general lighting. Any suggestions are most welcome.
That's wonderful! I want to do the same thing with a dandelion -- I've had one go from yellow bloom to puffball in less than one day. What was the timing you used, and how did you trigger the frames?
If I can download that, I have Adobe Premiere, which may allow some kind of collor/lighting correction to be applied. You might also try converting it into a Photoshop Filmstrip file, correct each frame, and export back into Quicktime.
You should make up a Credits/Copyright frame to tack on at the end if you're going to post this on the net.
Hey my camera can take very short shots of movement (as in video). That might be a fun challenge: give us a time limit and take moving pictures! (ala Harry Potter!)
In case anyone's interested, I took another stab at this, having improved the lighting and background. You can view or download the video, but it's just over 2 megs.
My wife is a big orchid nut. She wants to tell you that you have a beautiful "Phal" there. Nice capture. The seond movie is sooo cool! Excellent work. Does the D60 have a time-lapse function?
The first video was my first attempt at this, so I just set the camera (manually focused) up on a tripod with power adapter attached, connected my timer remote and let it go for a couple of days.
For the second one, I moved the orchid into a dark room and did some test shots with flash and a black faux velvet backdrop. Everything else was the same except for the flash. I put the flash in SE mode and had to switch them out every 8-12 hours. The time between shots was 15 minutes. I'm trying a 3rd version with the last bud and 7.5 minutes (I might switch to 5 though) between shots. I'll post again when it's ready.
I did a crop and resize with a command line utility (convert) then fed them all to another clu (mpeg_encode).
In case anyone is interested, I've updated my time lapse gallery with my latest addition, an Amaryllis bloom shot over about 20 hours (there are two size available, 360x240 and 600x400). I also added a crappy old (from 2003) Hoya bloom that took 18 days (the time lapse is crappy, not the Hoya). Note that these files are very large (anywhere from 2M to 10M).
That is amazing! The amarylis one is nice too. If you watch closely, you can see the stem growing upwards. Either that or your tripod is losing air. Well done!
My goodness, that was a treat. Especially watching the flower change, frame by frame. And in the first one, observing the antics of the greenery in the background! Keep up the good work!
In case anyone's interested, I took another stab at this, having improved the lighting and background. You can view or download the video, but it's just over 2 megs.
Setup and Capture 1. Optionally (but ideally) isolate your subject where the lighting is strictly controlled (or predictable). This might mean using an external light source, such as a flash. If you can eliminate other factors such as wind, pets, curious friends, that's also good.
2. Give your subject a high-contrast background. I like using a black velvet backdrop.
3. Shoot in your smallest size JPG mode, but use the higher quality setting.
4. Connect your camera to line power (e.g. using a supplied ACDC converter). If you can't do this, be prepared to watch your setup, have a spare set of freshly charged batteries, and switch them out periodically.
5. Get your camera on a tripod. I wish you the best of luck trying this without one.
6. Use some kind of remote to control the periodic triggering of your camera. This might be a laptop, a PC, or (in my case) a special timer remote that connects to the camera. If you have to physically touch your camera (even with it mounted on a tripod) to trigger the shutter, then you may get jitter/jerks resulting from the ever-so-slight movements caused by this.
7. Make sure your setup can accomodate the final size of your subject (in my case, blooming flowers can get quite big). In one case (the Hoya) I used a zoom lens which I periodically zoomed out (you can see these as jerky jumps in the video) to get as much detail in each frame as possible (more on this later).
8. If your camera supports custom WB and your lighting is controlled (or is mostly predictable), shoot a white target (bond paper is probably sufficiently close for this kind of work) and use it for your custom WB setting. Sometimes (e.g. window-list scene) this isn't going to help much: just use Auto WB and capture all that interesting light change.
9. Estimate how long you'll have to maintain this setup and guess how often you'll have to take shot (your periodicity). Remember, the camera you're using for this time lapse will be out of commission for the duration. Ideally, your shot to shot time will be constant, but there may be good cause to vary it throughout the shoot. For my Amaryllis setup, I took one shot every minute for about 20 hours (the final video was truncated to about 16 hours worth). For my Hoya setup, I took one shot every 15 minutes for about 18 days.
10. Check on your setup every so often for battery changes (where applicable) or memory card changes (unless you're getting them direct to laptop/PC).
Image Prep and Video Creation I use *nix-based, command-line tools for this part, so you'll have to find your own way if *nix is not your happy place.
1. Use mogrify to optionally crop (a copy of) each of your images. In step 7 above, I mentioned using a zoom lens to get detail at each step, your image capture is considerably larger than your final (video frame) size. You could do (calculated) variable cropping to simulate the zoom and get as much detail in your frame as possible throughout the video. For my Amaryllis I used the following command:
mogrify -crop 1251x834+125+0 -quality 95 COPY.jpg
2. Use mogrify to resize (the cropped copy of) your images. For the Amaryllis I create two sets of images at two sizes (600x400 and 360x240) with these commands:
mogrify -resize 600x400! -quality 80 COPY.jpg mogrify -resize 360x240! -quality 80 COPY2.jpg
3. Use jpegtran to optionally (and losslessly) rotate your images (where applicable). For my Amaryllis, I use this command:
jpegtran -rotate 270 -copy all -outfile jpeg/600x400/COPY.JPG COPY.JPG.
4. Once all your images have been prepared, use jpeg2yuv and mpeg2enc to create your video. For example, this is what I used from my 600x400 Amaryllis:
