Tag Archives: videos

Sunset / Moonset Time-Lapse

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Oh, I’ve got it bad.

I really feel almost addicted to making these movies. I know they’re not really any good, but I think they’re interesting (at least). And they’re helping me to understand how to create time-lapse movies, what works, and what doesn’t work.

Yesterday afternoon, I set up my camera and time-lapse equipment on the upstairs patio of my house, pointing at the sunset. Then I let it go, shooting one image every 20 seconds. It was nearly 11 PM when I turned it off. By that time, the crescent moon had set, too.

The resulting video included a lot of blank sky. My exposure was not lengthy enough to capture the stars after sunset, although one very bright star does set with the moon when it finally makes its appearance. I cut the video into two pieces: sunset and moonset. Here they are.

Sunset Time-Lapse

It was a pretty good afternoon for shooting the sunset. In Arizona, we don’t get clouds very often — although this year, our annual monsoon may be starting early. Yesterday afternoon, there were a lot of clouds out to the west — enough to completely filter the sun and give it something to paint with color as it set.

I should mention here that this is the same sky you can see in the time-lapse I did earlier in the day of the saguaro flowers. I just moved the camera upstairs and excluded anything other that the sky (and a tiny bit of a distant tree — darn it!). The only thing I wish is that I’d begun the time-lapse before the sun entered the camera’s frame. I think it would have been more interesting to see it drift in and then set.

I also need to point out that this video (and the one with the cactus flowers) really illustrates what I find attractive about time-lapse photography. It isn’t showing us anything we can’t see on our own. But it’s speeding up the process, making it possible to see motion where we normally wouldn’t. For example, this video is 20 seconds long. I created it using images spaced 20 seconds apart, then put them together in a 15 frames per second video. Do the math: 15 x 20 x 20 = 6000 seconds of real time. That’s 100 minutes. Would you sit still for 1 hour and 40 minutes to watch a sunset? And, if you did, would you see the clouds and sun moving as they clearly are in the video?

Moonset Time-Lapse

I cut out all the boring black night sky to produce this short video of the setting crescent moon. Not terribly exciting, I’m afraid.

One of the things I learned here is to set the exposure manually so all shots are the same. Let’s face it — the brightness of the image shouldn’t change. One exposure should do the trick. If I’d made a longer exposure, I would have had a brighter moon and more stars. And if I’d fixed the exposure to be the same for every shot, the brightness of the moon wouldn’t change from one shot to the next. (I sure hope some more knowledgeable photographers out there will correct me if I’m wrong on this.)

What Do You Think?

I’d love to get your feedback about my time-lapse mania. Are you enjoying them as much as I am? Am I wasting my time? Do you have any specific topics you’d like to see in time-lapse? Use the Comments link for this post or any of the other time-lapse posts to let me know.

Alex the Bird at the Office

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Showing off.

I bought Alex the Bird a stand that he can hang out on in my office. The idea was really to take it down to Rear Window (our Phoenix condo) so he can hang out with me when I work there. He really hates it there and I know he’d like it better if he could spend more time with me. But since neither of us spend much time at Rear Window, the stand hasn’t made it down there yet.

Anyway, I realized that with him standing behind me, I could probably get some good photos of him with my computer’s built-in iSight camera. So I took a shot.

Then I realized that I could also make a movie with the camera. So I fired up iMovie and recorded directly from the iSight into an iMovie file. Here’s the result. Alex can talk up a storm when he’s in the mood, but he wasn’t at his best this evening. I’ll try again another time.

Stress Levels Rise as Blogging Frequency Falls

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Something I’ve noticed.

You may have noticed that my blogging activity has dropped off again. There are two reasons for this:

  • I’ve tried three times to write a blog entry and all three times the text is moving off on a tangent that leads to a dead end. I’m blocked.
  • I’m working against three deadlines, only one of which is self-imposed, to get a bunch of stuff done. I can’t seem to work as quickly as I used to.

Whatever the reason, I’m blogging less and feeling more stressed. Some people might argue that those two things are not related, but I think they are, at least in part.

When I start my day with a blog post, as I did each day last week, I feel good about myself and ready to start the day. Maybe it’s because I’ve managed to produce something at the very start of my day, before most folks are even awake. Maybe it’s because it sets the pace of my day to get more done. Maybe it’s because writing in my blog often helps get things off my chest or out of my head, stored in a safe place so I can clear them from my mind. In any case, blogging helps me to think and to work better.

What’s on My Mind

This week I’ve got a ton on my mind.

My company was mentioned in Arizona Highways magazine and that has led to a dramatic increase in calls for my flying services. In the past two weeks, I’ve sold three 6-day excursions and have at least two other people seriously considering it. If this pace keeps up, I’ll be flying two to three excursions a month during the spring and autumn months. While this is a great thing, it also brings on a lot of stress — making reservations, worrying about customer satisfaction, thinking about weather and helicopter maintenance issues — the list goes on and on.

This stress is only complicated by the fact that I’m working on a book revision that I need to have done by mid-May. While the software I’m writing about isn’t technically even in beta yet, it’s pretty stable. But there are a few features that simply don’t work. I don’t have access to the bug reporter, where I normally contribute to the company’s efforts to identify and squash bugs, so I don’t know if they are aware of the little problems I’m seeing. And, in the back of my mind, is the possibility that the software’s interface might change. I’m 5 chapters into a 24 chapter book right now — a book rich with thousands of screen shots — and if there’s a major interface change tomorrow or next week or as I’m wrapping up, I’ll have to do the whole revision all over again. How’s that for a stressful thought?

And why do I need the book done by mid-May? That’s another stressful situation. I’ve been contracted for cherry drying in Washington State this summer. Unfortunately, I haven’t been given a start date yet. It’ll take me a week to get the helicopter up to Seattle for its annual inspection, come home to get my truck and trailer, and drive back up there to my contract starting point. But I don’t have any details about where or when I’ll begin work. I could theoretically get a call next week — while I’m on one of my excursions — telling me to report in on May 5. I’d have to scramble hard to make that happen.

Related to this is my need to fill at least one seat on the flight from the Phoenix area to the Seattle area. It’s about a 10 hour flight and the cost of such a flight is enormous. I need a couple of passengers or a helicopter pilot interested in building time to bring in some revenue for the flight. Trouble is, it’s hard to get the word out, few people who hear about it understand what an incredible opportunity the flight is, and those people who do want to go simply don’t have that kind of money. My summer profitability depends, in part, on covering my costs for the ferry flight with revenue.

And on top of all this is the video project from hell, which I prefer not to discuss here until it has been resolved.

So you can see why my mind might not be tuned in properly for blogging.

Taking it One Day at a Time

I know that the best way to work through this stressful time is to take one day at a time and get as much done as possible. My main motivation is peace of mind. The more things I complete, the fewer things I’ll have on my mind to stress me out. While some thing are out of my control — will they change the user interface of the software? will I be called to Washington before mid May? — others aren’t. I just need to plug away at them until I get them taken care of.

And I need to blog every morning. It sure does feel better when I do.

Foraging with Alex the Bird

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A down-to-earth video.

So many of my videos are about flying or show off scenes from the air. I thought I’d work on one that was a little closer to earth. This one features my parrot, Alex the Bird, foraging for treats in his cage. I blogged about this particular toy way back in 2006.

The text that follows is the narration you’ll find on the video. The video is at the bottom of this post. This was mostly an experiment to see how I could use the voiceover feature of iMovie ’09. I couldn’t. I wound up recording the narration in Audio Hijack Pro and editing it in Fission, then dragging clips into iMovie. iMovie apparently no longer includes audio editing features. This is unfortunate. I’m trying to figure out why Apple keeps removing features from iMovie as it updates it. (Of course, I can’t complain, given the image stabilization feature is so incredible.)

Anyway, here’s the narration and video. Enjoy.

I’ve put together this little video of Alex foraging for treats. I thought it might be interesting for folks who like birds or are considering buying one. It’s also a video exercise for me, but that’s another story.

In the wild, parrots forage for food. That means they use their claws and beaks to tear apart nuts and berries and pull bark off of trees looking for food. They don’t have their food in ceramic cups like caged parrots do. Foraging is an instinct. It also keeps the birds pretty busy all day so they don’t have time to be bored.

Alex has never lived in the wild, but he still has foraging instincts. And I like to keep him busy so he doesn’t get bored and engage in self-destructive behavior, like feather plucking.

What you see here is a cage-like structure that I bought years ago when I first got Alex. It came with shreddable toys and blocks in it. Alex was only mildly interested in it. But when I replaced those toys with plain old shredded paper surrounding Alex’s favorite treats — edamame or soy bean pods and unsalted cashews — he got very interested. So every few days, I set him up with this hanging toy so he can forage for his favorite foods.

As you watch this video, you might notice a few things.

First, Alex knows the treats are in there and he knows what he needs to do to get at them — pull all the paper out. This looses up the tightly packed cage so he can pull the beans and nuts out and eat them. You’ll see him successfully remove a few beans and nuts in this video. I cut out a lot of the shredding activity. It took Alex about 40 minutes to work through the toy today, and no one is interested in watching him that long.

Also, you’ll see Alex use his feet to steady the swinging toy. Letting the toy swing from the top of the cage makes it tougher for him. Tougher is better. I’ve learned that the goal is to make the foraging task difficult enough that it takes him a long time but not so tough that he gives up.

You may also notice Alex glancing back at the camera. The camera was sitting on a tripod near his cage and he didn’t quite trust it. He keeps looking at it to make sure it’s not sneaking up on him to attack him. Fortunately, he’s more interested in the treats than the camera.

Alex is almost eight years old. He’s expected to live 40 or 50 years. Right now, he’s just finishing up his winter molt, so his feathers don’t look as good as they would in a month or two. He molts every winter and looks pretty ratty for about two to three months.

I hope you enjoyed this visit with Alex. You can stop by my Web site, AnEclecticMind.com, to see more videos from my life.

Escalante Run (by Helicopter)

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Another high-speed run up a canyon.

I don’t want anyone to think I do this regularly. I don’t. It’s dangerous. An engine failure at this altitude/speed/terrain combination would be very, very ugly. I won’t do this with paying passengers aboard — unless we’re on a video mission that requires it. I do wear a life jacket any time I’m flying over a body of water beyond glide distance to land. Yes, I do take risks when I need to. But I also try to minimize them any way I can.

I needed this footage for one of my video projects. I figured that it might make an interesting video, if set to music, on my blog. So here it is.