Getting back on the horse

I had been awful busy this last year, we introduced Chronos Lite earlier this year, and ran a kickstarter campaign for the Lens Apparatus. Unfortunately i couldn’t dedicate any of my cameras for a long term time lapse. After we launched the Kickstart campaign I was determined to get back into plant growth. This is also nice because I can do this from my home and I’m not really a big fan of hiking around in the cold. ;) I figure this would be the perfect time to get back into Plant Timelapse Photography. I had recently re-carpeted my basement and that room in the basement was empty and ready for the taking. I knew I wanted to go bigger and better, the Hyacinth was a great test and learning experience, but it was a far cry from what i wanted to do. Rather than a single plant, I wanted to create entire scenes. I wanted to take this further than what anybody else has done in the past. Of course this would require baby steps. I don’t just want to jump in head first, but of course, that is exactly what I did. I had seen some beautiful plant timelapses online, there are not many of them, some of them were very well done, some looked like they were done with a low res webcam and are almost unbearable to watch due to all the flicker. I had also seen some shockingly good timelapses done by the BBC on their Life documentaries. That is what i wanted to do, but not just that, i want to take it further, much further. I pulled the air hockey table back out, fetched the grow lights, and this time instead of having some very fragile setup of wires on a breadboard I used a DFRobot 12×6 LCD/Button shield, a protoshield, and an Arduino micro-controller. About 6-7 hours of programming over the course of a week and i had a fairly decent little light controller. More on the controller in the next segment. I did not simply want the black background, so i picked up some fake plants from hobby lobby and some sky blue seamless paper and worked out a little set with a mix of life and fake plants with the blue background.

Getting back on the Horse October 2013

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The first tests were successful technically. I picked up an Orchid and some lilies, however it became readily apparent that the single 4 foot long grow light just was not enough. I replaced it with 4 foot fixture that held 4 grow light tubes. In the end, the Orchids still did not want to do squat. However that was unimportant, it was the first test run of the new controller and things worked out just fine. So I moved the Orchids to my kitchen (where they are putting on a far better fight of survival than the Hyacinth) and went to the store and picked up some Oriental Lilies

This turned out a LOT better. These flowers are HUGE. Everything synced up, good movement, good lighting, good motion. The first short clip was using the 12-50 lens on macro mode, motion was a bit much. Not that good in the end. The next clip turned out pretty good, the problem was they took up so much room i was really cornered into a single angle.

Just a mental note, be careful if these things die. I had planned to try to change their color as I have seen others do before with food coloring in the water. Instead it just killed the flowers, but it was fun watching them wilt. The problem is after a few days they started to smell bad, and I smelled them up close and felt like I was going to vomit for the next several hours.