From this morning. No audio but it's in 4K!

A view out our front window, today.

On a whim I did this time lapse out our front window yesterday. I didn't plan it out very well and I shot it through the half of the window with a screen, but it turned out ok, I think. Look for the tree branches springing upwards as they lose snow, car tire tracks evaporating, and the shadows and clouds moving as time progresses. The frames are separated by about 1 minute for the most part, but I was adjusting the interval in the beginning so not all frames are separated by the same amount of time. For the best effect, make sure the "HD" option is turned on and the video is viewed in full screen. It's 1m20s long.

1 min 6 sec, no sound

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.

Two days ago Melissa and I drove from Berkeley to San Diego. We drove on US 101 for most of the way, but used Hwy 1 between Monterey and San Luis Obispo. The weather was fantastic and the scenery beats I-5 any day, even on 101. It does take longer, but it's worth it if you don't have arrive at the destination at any particular time. I wanted to record the journey, as I have before, but this time looking forward. Using the Canon A620 my father gave me and my laptop connected to it using USB, I managed to do this without too much interference. However, the batteries on the camera died early on, so I didn't capture the whole trip, or even the most scenic parts of it. In the future I'll need to use an external power source.

I am sharing it because there's no harm. It's not very good, so I didn't bother to add any music.

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

10:36 playing time, 7629 frames, 41h41m, ~20s between frames, Nov 14-16, 2007

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.

919 frames, 1h15m real time, ~5s between frames, my apartment to Newport Beach, I-5 to I-405 to CA-55, June 30, 2007

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.

25s playing time, 150 frames, ~40s between frames, May 28, 2007

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. A couple of the bees had very impressive collections of pollen on their legs.

3m 11s playing time, 1917 frames, 7h 39m, ~13s between frames, March 20, 2007

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.

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.

1000 frames, 3h 40m, ~13s between frames, 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.

Taken from the SERF Building on 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.

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 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.

The camera is on top of the TV at Dave Sabo's house, January 14, 2007