Hyancinth First Biolapse

Hyacinth Feb 2013 Early this year before the end of last winter I was tired of waiting for winter to end and decided to buy a grow light, a flower, and built a light controller to coordinate a time lapse of a flower. I set it all up in a room in my basement, shot for about 1 week, and ended up getting some pretty killer results. The entire setup was pretty hokey though, luckily i have the spare room with no windows, and an old air hokey table that nobody has used in years… well.. ever really… I purchased a 4 foot long Jumpstart grow-light off of Amazon, and spend a few hours bread-boarding out a controller. The entire thing was pretty rickety but the results were what mattered. The controller (the jumbled mess of wires on the breadboard) was fairly straight forward. It consisted of an LCD display, 4 buttons, a relay, and two 3.5mm audio jacks which are the same style I use on the ChronoTimers.

Pretty straight forward!

Every day i would pull the memory card, dump the data, change the position of the camera and hyacinth, and start it back up.

After 4 days of shooting I decided I wanted to kill the plant, I thought showing it bloom then die would be sort of a neat timelapse. So I got some ground-kill from my shed and poured it in the plants water. it was about 50% ground-kill 50% water.

Day 5, the plant still looked good. So I added bleach to the solution.

Day 6 the plant still looked fine. I added salt.

Day 7 the plant still looked fine. So I wrapped up the shoot, turned out the lights, and started working on rendering the timelapse.

Day 8 i retrieved the plant from the room, and it still looked fine, in fact, it looked fantastic.. I took it upstairs, washed off the bulb, gave it fresh water and put it by the kitchen window to get some light. I figured after all that abuse I could just keep the flower.

Day 9 the plant limp, pale, and dead.

I really did not run into any problems, on one of the clips I was shooting at 1/320s shutter speed and got a bunch of flicker, and I did try to connect my Chronos rail up but was having difficulties getting it to trigger, i had assumed because of the breadboarded controller had a wiring problem. So i just “Ken Burns”-ed it out in post.

This was the end of my first foray into the world of Plant timelapse. It was a rewarding experience, and I really looked forward to doing it again sometime.