Monday 31 July 2017

Clouds - Time-lapse

I've been promising myself to get round to making another time-lapse video of the passing clouds. To give a reasonable length of time to take the stills I have to wait until we return from our mid-morning perambulation. In this day and age it would be foolish to leave expensive camera equipment unattended even in the back garden. Problem is, the clouds often evaporate during the morning as the heat from the Sun increases and I don't always have fully charged batteries ready for a lengthy session.

Anyway, today I got round tuit and set up the modified Canon 1200D. The one which sees more IR and UV than normal which is why the green trees aren't.  1000 jpg exposures later I managed, with a struggle, to convert them to a video:



The cameras I usually use tend to run out of battery soon after the 700 exposure mark but this one still had about half left even after a couple of hours taking a shot every ten seconds.  I usually shoot the clouds as they retreat. Don't know about you but I find the time-lapse approaching clouds feels more foreboding, sinister in some way.

YouTube cut off the sound at the end. I had slowly faded it after the final part of the video but YT chopped that bit off. Must remember to put a plain colour filler in next time.

I've been playing a lot with my Amateur Radio gear. Had my first confirmed contact with a station in Brazil which really made me 'well chuffed'. 6039 miles with just 25W of power using a digital mode. Nearly got my first direct contact in the USA last night. My call was received and acknowledged but the conditions deteriorated rapidly so a full two-way contact wasn't made. I've talked to American amateurs in the past but that was by sending my signal up to an amateur satellite and having in re-broadcast.

9 comments:

  1. This is brilliant John. I don't understand the mechanics of it all but so enjoyed watching the video.

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    1. Weaver: I always find the constant changing cloud formations fascinating.

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  2. Like the cloud video, but it doesn't seem ominous at all to me to having them rushing in. But I didn't have the sound on - maybe that makes a difference.

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    1. Wilma: Ah. I found it less ominous after I added the sound.

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  3. Much better on the Canon. If you fancy you can shoot at full sensor resolution and then pan and zoom as there is plenty to spare. I must do another one, thanks for the reminder.

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    1. Adrian: I had real difficulty with the only free Mac program I have for building video from jpg files. It kept hanging at 93%. It hasn't been updated for years whereas the OS has so maybe it is not so compatible now. Must use a wide angle lens nest time and give room for panning.

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    2. John, I shoot RAW or small RAW. Batch convert in Photoshop then use Blender for compilation. The latter is getting very good and if you need them there is an excellent series of HowTos'. The downside is that one ends up with massive file sizes. These are the ones I prefer MIKEYCAL

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  4. Enjoyed the video. Very dramatic.

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    Replies
    1. Dave: Pleased you enjoyed it. For once there were plenty of clouds to capture.

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Thank you for visiting. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. Any comment, or correction to any information or identification I get wrong, is most welcome. John

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