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:

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Seattle Sunset Timelapse - 1700 shots, one every 2.5 seconds, stitched together with Lightroom 4.1, LRTimelapse and a self-compiled command-line ffmpeg binary.

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...

A FOREST OF SPIKEYNESS
Volunteer Park Conservatory - has lots of cacti, bromeliads, epiphytes and all sorts.

PLANT GONADS
And orchids. Why does nobody ever explain the etymology of that name? They had a not-yet-flowering Amorphophallus titanum too. Ditto.

Thunder and lightning! Very very frightening!
Unforecast thunderstorm early in the morning - go read Prof. Cliff's blog for details.

Article comments (now closed)

parm's gravatar

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..

Pace's gravatar

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?

Cargo Cult's gravatar

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...

Pace's gravatar

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.

Cargo Cult's gravatar

5. Pepsis formosa

Posted by Cargo Cult at 11:15PM, Saturday July 21 2012

I vaguely recall being repeatedly eaten to death by those bastards on a trip to a radioactive Las Vegas. Or was that New Vegas?

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