You know how it is on the web. You see one thing that catches your attention (whoa ... thats pretty cool... ) and you follow a link, which led me to another link, and the next thing I knew I was watching some cool youtube videos on creating time lapse images. I tried one today on my way home from work. As any of you who are local to the Central New York region are more than painfully aware - Spring is takings it's merry f_#c^g! time getting here. While the weather certainly wasn't great today, it did have some low hanging, very quickly moving, and thick cloud cover. I figured that I might head up to the top of the ridge that overlooks Munnsville (Hamilton County) and see if I could frame up a wind turbine or two with the cloud cover moving by as a backdrop. I found a spot, pulled the car over and parked and then attempted to open the door to get out. I say attempted. It was windy as all hell up there!! I mean like, I had to really push on the door just to get it open enough so that I could get out of the car... for real.
Now I'm standing out there in this gale force wind and am seriously second guessing my intent - the camera isn't heavy enough to stay put - even clamped onto the tripod. My past experience from bike racing kicks in ... see if I can find shelter from the wind off of the back of the car and just keep the tripod and camera mounted as low at rear tail lights height... that'll work. There is still a fair bit of wind swirling about where I setup just off of the back of the car, but it's not nearly enough to potentially blow the thing over.
As usual I'm watching the clock... I want to play with this as a test, but I also don't want to try and test / play with a full on multi hours long time lapse either... I'd like to get home. I figure I'll go for 200 frames with about a 5 second delay between shots. ( you use the camera's built in intervalometer ) Quick math off of my cell phone tells me that this will take about 16'ish minutes ... so I start it and then just go back into the car and check e-mail, facebook, etc ... on my iPhone. I go out and check it from time to time .... 125 more shots to go .... back to the car. 75 more to go .... hang out and wait for it .... finished!
I get home, eat dinner and then sit down at the computer and revisit the video where I first saw this and more or less follow along. My first (very rough) down and dirty time lapse... ! 16 minutes (and some change I'm thinking) worth of images shot over 200 frames and then turned into a video compressed down to 12 seconds.
