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Amaryllis Time-Lapse
27 Dec 2017 07:31Yesterday was the family's Christmas dinner and gift exchange.
I had noticed that one of my amaryllises might bloom yesterday, so before I left the house, I set up an old camera taking interval photos with the idea of creating a time-lapse.
It worked out fairly well -- the bloom opened. The weight of the bloom caused the bloom to move to the right throughout the time-lapse. You'll have to click on the photo below to open this in Flickr to actually see the time-lapse:
The process I used --
1) Camera settings: I set the white balance on the camera to one particular setting (not auto), so that it did not change on every photo. Since I knew the lighting would be changing significantly throughout the day, I decided to allow the camera to auto focus, and auto expose.
2) Triggering the shots: I used an external intervalometer to control the shots -- setting the device to trigger the camera to shoot every 5 minutes. I chose 5 minutes because I figured the amaryllis would be fairly slow to open, meaning slow movements which would NOT require frequent shots.
3) Editing the photos: I used an old copy of Lightroom to edit 1 photo to brighten up the photo, increase the contrast a bit, etc. Then I copied the settings from that one photo to all the other photos. Then I exported all the photo as JPGs to a separate folder.
4) Constructing the time-lapse: I could have used Photoshop to create the time-lapse, but since I no longer use Photoshop (boy do I hate monthly subscriptions!), I used Time Lase Assembler. The app has a simple user interface that does what you would expect -- takes all the JPGs in 1 folder and assembles them into a movie.
I had noticed that one of my amaryllises might bloom yesterday, so before I left the house, I set up an old camera taking interval photos with the idea of creating a time-lapse.
It worked out fairly well -- the bloom opened. The weight of the bloom caused the bloom to move to the right throughout the time-lapse. You'll have to click on the photo below to open this in Flickr to actually see the time-lapse:
The process I used --
1) Camera settings: I set the white balance on the camera to one particular setting (not auto), so that it did not change on every photo. Since I knew the lighting would be changing significantly throughout the day, I decided to allow the camera to auto focus, and auto expose.
2) Triggering the shots: I used an external intervalometer to control the shots -- setting the device to trigger the camera to shoot every 5 minutes. I chose 5 minutes because I figured the amaryllis would be fairly slow to open, meaning slow movements which would NOT require frequent shots.
3) Editing the photos: I used an old copy of Lightroom to edit 1 photo to brighten up the photo, increase the contrast a bit, etc. Then I copied the settings from that one photo to all the other photos. Then I exported all the photo as JPGs to a separate folder.
4) Constructing the time-lapse: I could have used Photoshop to create the time-lapse, but since I no longer use Photoshop (boy do I hate monthly subscriptions!), I used Time Lase Assembler. The app has a simple user interface that does what you would expect -- takes all the JPGs in 1 folder and assembles them into a movie.