So I made several attempts at capturing a time-lapse video of the recent Perseid meteor shower. I don't think the meteors show up in the video (the streaks you see shoot across the sky are airplanes), but you do get to see the Milky Way move across the sky...

I've posted it to both Vimeo (above) and Youtube (below) to try and figure out which rendering I like better.

- Bill

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

So for a recent assignment on a photography forum that I post to regularly, one of the members picked "Time and Motion" as the theme. That instantly got me thinking time lapse! I've been wanting to try my hand at time lapse for a long time, and as things usually go, procrastination got the better of me.

Anyway, this apparently was the right motivation!

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 II at 31mm, 1 second at f/5.0. ISO 2500. 695 frames taken every 5 seconds. RAW processing Adobe Camera Raw, video rendered in Adobe Premiere Elements 11.

As you can see, it isn't the best attempt, but I definitely learned a few things to keep in mind for next time.

Thanks for stopping by.

- Bill