Ok - I haven't posted in a couple weeks, but I have a really good reason! For the past 5 days, my camera has been taking photographs non-stop. Yes - five straight days of taking photos, once every minute, to make the following video.

After trying time lapse with the moon rise, I thought I should try something else again soon. With the weather being absolutely disgusting of late and really wishing spring would get here sooner, I thought some flowers blooming might look cool. Right around the time that I did the other time lapse, Anya had brought home a single hyacinth in a small pot from the grocery store, but it bloomed before I had the thought to try it. Luckily, the next weekend was Valentine's Day, so I bought Anya another hyacinth and then quickly stole it back.

To be honest, I did not originally expect this time lapse to take as long as it did. Anya's first hyacinth seemed to bloom in about 24 hours, so I was planning on that. What ended up happening was 5 days (and as you'll see, I cut it off a little early too). In order to achieve that, I had to change memory cards three times a day, camera batteries twice a day, and batteries in my intervalometer (the device that handles taking all the photos on the schedule) once a day. Because I chose to make exposures once per minute, I had plenty of time to do each of those maintenance tasks in between images without any problem.

In the end, I had 7228 images totaling 162GB. I tried processing all of them into a video, but it ended up being about 4 minutes long, and that just felt a bit too long, so I decided to drop half of the images to trim down the total length of the video. I might go back into the video processing software (Premiere Elements 11) to see if I can figure out how to either speed up the video or whether the 4 minute video does work. Having more frames in the video would make it smoother, but I still like the shorter running length.

Anyway, here's the current version of this video...

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 II at 18mm, 1/6th second at f/8.0. ISO 100. 3614 frames taken every 60 seconds. RAW processing Adobe Camera Raw, video rendered in Adobe Premiere Elements 11.

Oh - something I failed to do on the last time lapse was to accompany it with some music. It took me a while to decide on the final piece to use, and part of that decision was based on the running time of the video. In the end, though, I think it really fits the video well. If you are curious, the piece is Camille Saint-Saëns' The Carnival of the Animals: Aquarium.

Thanks for viewing.

- Bill