Timelapse-o-Tron™ 9000, part 1a
posted in Photography by Cargo Cult on Tuesday July 10 2012
I'm still writing up parts two (and three) of my how-does-my-intervalometer-work series of articles, but in the meantime have a summery, Space Needle-y, Sunday Seattle sunset sequence that I shot the other day:
Apparently it's good enough to appear on the Cliff Mass Weather Blog - home of gloriously in-depth discussion and analysis of the weird weather we get in the Pacific Northwest.
I'm rather proud of it - and I've still got loads more to upload from Sunday. It was a particularly productive day of photography...



Article comments (now closed)
2. The sky
Posted by Pace at 8:17PM, Tuesday July 10 2012
I've discovered since moving to a town called 'Sunnyvale' that utter lack of clouds can actually make the sky a less interesting place as well. I honestly haven't seen a cloud in weeks. (not that I'm looking for sympathy.)
You'd think fancy cameras would allow for time lapse photography without need for a soldering iron?
3. Hardware
Posted by Cargo Cult at 9:27PM, Wednesday July 11 2012
I've got some Lego Mindstorms stuff that's desperately wanting to cart a timelapse-shooting camera along - I need to do some experimentation!
(Probably easy to get the Raspberry Pi to talk to it over USB, for maximum nerd credentials...)
I gather some Nikon (ack, spit!) dSLRs have simple intervalometers built in, but that the maximum number of shots is quite small. There's also a bunch of off-the-shelf intervalometers I could have used, but as people may have noticed already, I like doing things the hard way. ;-)
Clouds? Seattle specialises in blanket cloud coverage far too much of the time. I missed both a partial eclipse of the sun and the transit of Venus earlier this year for that very reason. It does make it more exciting when the sun *does* break through, though...
4. intervalometer is a silly, silly word
Posted by Pace at 9:47PM, Thursday July 12 2012
We do have plenty of sun here, but I've recently learned that we also have these horrific bastards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pepsis_formosa02.jpg
called 'tarantula hawks', whose "sting is considered among the most painful insect stings in the world." That picture was apparently taken not far from where I live. Yeeks.
Er, okay, a bit off topic.
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1. Cor
Posted by parm at 12:05PM, Tuesday July 10 2012
That am pretty. Now you need to wire up a bunch of worm gears and dollys to get those neat panning, too...
I went through a phase of doing timelapses with my firmware-hacked little Canon compact, but sadly the skyline round here isn't anything like as interesting as the one in Seattle, and I can't get a decent angle on a sunset without other houses blocking the view :(
That said, I've got an Arduino kicking around so maybe I should get a opto-isolator, wire up my DSLR and take some ultra-HD timelapses of the endlessly grey British summer skyline..