Time lapse photography: Frost flowers

Time lapse photography is a method of creating films by taking a series of photos with constant interval, for example one minute, and then combining them together as a movie.

I was sick a while ago. The first day I didn’t do much but sleep and read comics. The second day, the most exciting event of the day was to see how the frost flowers in the window melted. In the morning it was about -27C but then during the day the sun heated the window so much that the frost flowers melted away. Seeing new flowers in the window the following morning, I decided to try to make a time lapse video of how they melt.

Code to control the camera

First, I grapped a piece of old camera control code from one of my old posts. gphoto2 is able to control my Nikon D70 DSLR over USB: tell it to take a shot, download the image and so on. So this is the code I ended up with:

for i in {1..400};
do
echo "#################"
echo "Photo $i"
date
echo "#################"

#capture a photo
gphoto2 --capture-image &
sleep 60
gphoto2 --get-file=$i
done

This takes a picture, waits for 60 seconds, downloads the previous picture, and starts it all over again. As it does this for 400 times, it should give me almost 7 hours of shooting time.

Notes

• Nikon D70, on manual mode, 1/800s, F7.1, manual focus
• Sigma F2.8 105mm macro lens
• D70 needs to be set  to PTP mode and also had to set the camera to store on the memory card (see gphoto2 –set-config-something..)
• Make sure you have enough space on the card! If this is a problem, you can also remove files from the camera using gphoto2 -D …
• Make sure you start with a full battery. I did. It went empty. Tried to replace it – only to find out that also my backup battery was empty. Fail.
• Don’t move the camera. Don’t touch it!
• During the shooting, I had this one-liner running in the folder where the images were downloaded: while true; do gwenview -s . && sleep 300; pkill gwenview; done to see some of the images on the screen all the time. It’d be nice if gwenview would integrate new files in the slideshow folder to the running slideshow, but as this didn’t work, I needed to kill and restart it every now and then to see the latest results.

Converting JPG files to video

It sure wasn’t easy to figure out a decent way to do this. But this is how I did it:

• Create a 3008x2000px (same as my camera resolution) jpg to use as title of the movie
• Save 4 copies of it (title1.jpg title2.jpg etc..)
• Create 1 second title clip: mencoder -nosound mf://*.jpeg -mf w=1504:h=1000:type=jpg:fps=8 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2160000:v4mv -o title.avi
• Create the ‘main film’: mencoder -nosound mf://*.JPG -mf w=1504:h=1000:type=jpg:fps=8 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2160000:v4mv -o movie.avi
• Join these together: avimerge -o final.avi -i title.avi title.avi title.avi movie.avi title.avi title.avi

Result

Have you tried it? Show me your results!

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