My beard experiment has ended. As part of the journey, I did an experimental time lapse, above. As you will see, I slowly shaved my beard and rotated the chair. I should have thought more about exposure consistency between frames. Doing it inside would have worked better but I thought the outside view was more interesting.

I admit that a few hours later I am still occasionally reaching up to stroke my beard, and finding nothing there.

I took a break when my mustache was in full flight and posed with Melissa. As you can tell by her expression, she loved the ‘stache.

I am sharing it because there’s no harm. It’s not very good, so I didn’t bother to add any music. Below the video you can see rough route the video covers on a Google map.

The video lasts 1 minute 44 seconds, is 5.6 MB in size, and the frames are separated by eight seconds.

Play Quicktime version

View Larger Map

This is the first time lapse that I’ve time-stamped. I felt it was useful as without the time-stamp, it’s hard to tell exactly what time it is, especially at night. It also allows you to see how traffic changes with each rush hour.

I think this time lapse would have worked pretty well with a very short interval, perhaps a second or less. Obviously, I couldn’t have run it for nearly two days, but it would have converted the traffic from random noise to the main subject. The most interesting stuff happens in the second evening when various mists and clouds come in, so feel free to fast-forward to that.

The biggest problem with this time lapse is the huge number of frames don’t actually contribute to the study. I could shorten the 10 minute running time by increasing the frame rate (or by not including all the frames), but at higher rates the traffic just looks even more random. Things would work better if the view changed much more smoothly.

Here is a neat time lapse of the drive from my apartment to Melissa’s maternal grandmother’s house in Newport Beach. I set my camera up on the tripod in the rear section of my Volvo station wagon. I held the tripod down with a few bungee cords, but you’ll notice that the camera moves slightly through the duration of the movie. I’ll have to devise some sort of better securing mechanism for future efforts. In particular, I’d like to figure out a solid way of having the camera point forward on the dashboard. I cropped the images to remove the majority of the inside of the car as it isn’t very exciting.

Because there is so much going on here, I find it’s nice to look at just one flower open up at a time. As the overcast conditions gave way to sunshine, intermittent clouds covered the sun, which lead to the change in brightness during the movie. As is the case with many of my time-lapse movies, the higher resolution version is well worth the download. Of course, either version is much better than anything you’d see on YouTube.

I also took some close-up images of the flowers, and the honey bees patronizing them. You can visit the gallery by clicking on the image below. A couple of the bees had very impressive collections of pollen on their legs.

Quicktime movie, 3.70mb, 3m 11s playing time
1917 frames, 7h 39m, ~13s between frames
1s playing time ~ +2min real time
from SERF, 4th floor, looking west
March 20, 2007
Recommended: Large Version, 1000×260, 25mb

Perhaps it’s the nature of pouring concrete, or union jobs, but the middle of this time lapse is pretty boring. Sorry about that. The beginning is fun enough; and the end, with the inch-worm workers and the vacuum-like concrete massager, is cool, too.

Please note the right 1/3 of the image is slightly affected by the reflection of the building façade on the window. Let me repeat, the large version is worth downloading.

Roll your mouse over the whitespace above and click it on it. Your challenge is to figure out what the image is as quickly as possible. I’ll wait…

Some of you may remember my photo mosaics I played around with a while back. This is exactly that, but this time, I took a screen shot every 20 seconds or so as the program refined the image.

This mosaic is made up of a bunch of ‘glyphs’ which are a colored square with a colored letter/symbol in the middle. The colors and symbol are randomly chosen. The movie above compresses about 8 hours of real time into under two minutes. In that 8 hours the program tried over 330,000 glyphs for the 2500 tiles on the image. The interesting thing is the basic shapes in the image resolved themselves quickly, while the colors took much longer, and never really matched the original image.

Here is a link to a composite photo, showing the original photo and the final mosaiced photo. I don’t think the mosiac really captures my tongue accurately.

Quicktime movie, 3.72mb, 1m 40s playing time
1000 frames, 3h 40m, ~13s between frames
my neighbors deck, looking north
February 22, 2007

This time lapse was shot before, during, and after the passing of a rain front. See if you can tell when the rain starts. The most interesting thing to follow are, of course, the clouds, which change direction & speed. The clouds really get moving on the backside of the front.

I hope you like the new, inline quicktime movie presentation.

Quicktime Movie, 7.44mb, 3m 1s playing time
Larger Version (worth the wait!), 42.83mb, 1000×655 pixels
1087 frames, 3h 36m, ~12s between frames
music: Comfort Eagle, by Cake
SERF building roof looking west
February 1, 2007

I would have liked this time lapse to cover more time, but the internal camera battery died because I didn’t fully charge it. I did have my external battery plugged in, but the camera cannot run off that alone. Also, since these images are very complex, even JPEG compression cannot reduce their size too much, and I nearly filled my 1gb card. For example, my previous time lapse project, Airport Sunset, I took over 600 more photos than this time. The difference is those frames had nearly half devoted to the sky.

Quicktime Movie, 9.80mb, 4m 47s playing time
1723 frames, 1h 44m, ~3.2s between frames
Laurel and Union streets facing nearly west
January 15, 2007

The external battery pack and ‘intervalometer’ are connected to the camera. I was hoping to capture the Comet McNaught but I should have read that linked article first, as it has become too close to the sun now. Next time I have a freeway in a time lapse I’ll situate it longitudinally so apparent motion is clearer.

Melting Ice
Quicktime Movie, 1.48 MB.

(p.s. More on this movie later…)