Category Archives: Multimedia

I get out to the movies and watch TV once in a while.

A Trip to the Wild Horse Wind Farm

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Huge windmills on a ridge.

The weather pattern here these days has been mostly sunny in the morning with increasing chance of showers in the afternoon. Because I have to fly after it rains (see “The Life of a Cherry Drying Pilot” for details), I need to be near the helicopter when it’s most likely to rain. That means the only time free for running errands and exploring my surroundings is when it’s least likely to rain. Lately, that means in the morning.

So yesterday morning I set out on a trip to the Wild Horse Wind Farm on a series of ridges northeast of Ellensburg. I can see the windmills from my camper down in Quincy and I visited them once before last year. This year, I bought along my Sony HD Handycam video camera and my new Flip Video. I wanted to capture the movement of the windmills, as well as the incredible “wooshing” sound the blades make as they cut through the air.

Visitor's Center

The Visitor’s Center at the Wild Horse Wind Farm.

I stopped for quite a while at the Visitor Center — mostly because it was cold outside. Wild Horse Ridge is quite a bit higher than it is in Quincy and, as you can imagine, it’s usually windy there. I threw a long-sleeved shirt on over my t-shirt but was still chilled. So I started out in the Visitor’s Center. Last time I’d been there, it had been crowded with kids, so I’d cut my visit short. This time I was able to look at the exhibits and video clips they had playing. One of the video monitors was playing a Nova episode about the Missoula Floods; I added it to my Netflix queue this morning. I especially liked the status monitor display which showed a video screen with a map of all 127 windmills, indication of which ones weren’t operating (two of them), and total power output of the operating generators.

I do recommend stopping at the Visitor’s Center if you ever go up there. There are plenty of easy-to-understand exhibits about the wind farm and energy, including some hands-on exhibits for kids. It’s also a great destination for school groups. The last time I was there, a busload of kids was on hand. They offer free tours of the facility that visit the controls in the base of one of the nearby windmill towers. I took the tour last time, so I skipped it this time.

Wild Horse Windmills

One of the windmills near the visitor center. This view faces out toward where I’m staying in Quincy.

When I was ready to go out and brave the wind, I took a short walk with my still camera before heading back to the truck for my Handycam and tripod. Even though the camera is tiny, I always put it on a tripod to shoot. I simply can’t hold it still enough to create good video on my own. I walked along various pathways and framed up what I think might be good shots. Then I took a series of 30-second clips, using my body and top shirt to shield the camera’s microphone from the wind. My goal was to capture the sound. I haven’t seen the clips yet, so I don’t know if I succeeded.

Afterwards, I stowed the camera back in the truck and brought out my Flip Video camera to do a few clips for use on my blog. I bought the Flip the other day as a birthday present to myself. I find that if I don’t get a new toy at least once every 6 months, I go nuts. I’ve been fiddling around a lot with video lately. My Sony takes amazing quality shots, but getting it Web-ready is a time-consuming, grueling process. I wanted an easier way to create Web-ready video at a better quality than my Blackberry Storm offers. When I saw the Flip while wandering around a mall the other day, I sprung for it. It certainly can’t be any easier to use. The video quality is so-so, but certainly good enough for the Web.

I shot the following three narrated sequences; I’ll let them speak for themselves. The second one, which shows off a blade on display, can give you an idea of the real size of these things — they’re huge.

Want some information about the Wild Horse Wind Farm? Here are three good links:

Or find other links by entering “Wild Horse Wind Facility” or “Wild Horse Wind Farm” in Google.

Sky Time-Lapse

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The latest.

I set this one up on the spur of the moment yesterday afternoon. I happened to look up and see some small, low, wispy clouds moving and shaping themselves in the sky. I had no afternoon plans, so I set up the camera with the snapshot interval set at one shot every 10 seconds.

I let it run for about 3-1/2 hours. During that time, a storm came through, dumping water on the campsite. It was fortunate that I had the camera under the awning and odd that it was pointed away from the storm clouds. The only evidence of rain is some blurriness in a few shots; I wiped it away between exposures.

I assembled the 1700+ images at 15 frames per second. This is the result.

I’m going to repeat this exercise later in the week for a longer period of time with a larger image. Someone on Viddler said it would make a great screen saver; it would be neat to make a movie large enough to fill a screen.

It would also be neat to set this to some kind of new age music.

Quincy Golf Course Time-Lapse

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Another one, with people.

Yesterday, I tried my hand with another time-lapse, this one involving people. I set up my camera near the base of some trees on the edge of the putting green area of the Colockum Ridge Golf Course and zoomed in a tiny bit on the pro shop, golf cart, and RV park area. I got it all started at around 6:15 AM, with one shot every 15 seconds. I let it run until about 4:20 PM — just over 10 hours. I assembled the movie two ways: 15 frames per second and 30 frames per second. I liked the shorter movie (30 fps). I used Stomp to crop the frame to 16:9 ratio as I compressed the movie, thus cutting out a bunch of boring grass and a little bit of the sky.

Here’s the final product:

Tuesday is men’s league day at the course, so I knew there would be a considerable crowd in mid-morning. I think it’s interesting to watch how the scene changes throughout the day. You gotta love the people jumping around in the frames. You can see my new neighbors arrive in the RV park — they had a heck of a time parking those big rigs in the relatively narrow parking spaces here. (I did much better when I arrived.) Did you see the birds walking all over the putting green early in the morning? And what was that that seemed to fly into the camera?

My thanks to the folks at the Colockum Ridge Golf Course. Do you golf? Have an RV? Know where Quincy, WA is? If you answered all of those questions, you have no excuse not to visit one day soon!

Quincy Clouds Time-lapse Movies

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I draft my old G5 for time-lapse duty.

About two weeks ago, I got the bright idea that it was a complete waste of valuable camera resources to use my Nikon D80 for time-lapse photography when I had an older camera I could use. The other camera is my Canon PowerShot G5, which I bought back in 2003 for aerial photography work.

Buying the camera was a huge deal back then. Digital SLRs, if available back then, were too expensive to be an option. The G5 offered 5.0 megapixel (!) resolution — more than twice the resolution of any other digital camera we had. But it also included features we needed, including manual setting for focus and exposure.

Canon PowerShot G5Looking at the camera today, it’s amazingly big and clunky. But it takes a decent picture — certainly good enough for my time-lapse experiments. And frankly, I was having trouble getting my mind around leaving my Nikon outdoors, unattended, for hours at a time. It could be because the tripod got knocked over once and it was sheer luck that it fell toward a rail that caught it rather than toward the empty concrete behind it. I had no love for the G5; if it broke, well, that’s the way it goes. Ditto if it got stolen. In fact, I’d be more upset about losing my tripod or Pclix than the G5.

Oddly enough, the G5 has a built-in intervalometer — a fact I was unaware of. Unfortunately, the interval must be set in minutes (1 to 60) and it can only take 100 shots at a time. This simply wasn’t going to cut it for my needs. Besides, for some reason I still can’t understand, I can’t get the damn thing to work.

So I bought an optical cable for my Pclix. It arrived right before I left for Washington. I tried it for the first time on Friday.

For the optical cable to work, its end must be taped to the camera. The Pclix maker recommends electrical tape, so that’s what I used. Unfortunately, the heat of the day softened the tape. After about 2-1/2 hours, it shifted out of position. The camera stopped taking pictures. Here’s the result, with most of the beginning edited out (since there was really nothing going on):

Disappointing in so many ways. The sky was just getting interesting when the setup failed. And let’s face it — the view of the golf cart shed isn’t all that enticing.

So I tried again yesterday after recharging the camera’s battery overnight. I fixed up the camera differently and pointed it north instead of west. Same settings: one shot every minute, compiled into a movie at 10 frames per second. To prevent the camera battery from running out, I turned off the camera’s video screen. First shot at 9:13 AM; last shot at 7:33 PM. I left the camera outside all day long — even while I was out doing a helicopter ride. I never would have done that with my Nikon.

The result isn’t bad at all. I’m a little POed at myself for including the wires in the shot and it’s a little weird that some of the larger vehicles that drove by appeared in some shots — like the hay truck near the beginning! Again, I think I could have done better. But the clouds are so awesome in this movie. They build and move and swirl around. So cool. See for yourself:

I’ll keep working on this. Hopefully, I’ll get it right soon.

Sunrise Time-Lapse with a Bonus

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I swear I’ll stop posting these. One day. Soon, maybe.

Nice colors and a bonus feature near the end.

The clouds were set up in the northeastern sky for an interesting sunrise when I woke up before dawn (again) this morning. So I set up my camera to record a time-lapse of the sunrise on the clouds. Settings: 1 shot every 10 seconds, made into a movie at 15 frames per second.

Caught an unexpected feature near the end.