We have a few Californian poppies in the garden that are a real joy to see flower each year. I hadn’t appreciated how sensitive to light they are until yesterday when I watched them open as the sun rose and then close as the day came to an end. It then dawned on me that would make a good photo project.
So I set the camera on a tripod. Camera settings were as follows:
- Aperture Priority
- 70-300mm lens set to 200mm f9
- ISO 3200 ( I wanted a fast shutter speed)
- Manual Focus so that there would be no change in focus point
- Camera Intervalometer set to 1 frame every minute for 2 hours
I had originally intended to share some of the key moments of the flower opening as single images. However it occurred to me that I might just have enough shots to make a short time lapse movie.
So I created a New project in iMovie and imported the jpegs. Then in iMovie preferences Changed the Photo Duration setting to 0.2 s and Transition to 0.5. Photo Placement was set to Crop to Fill. Theses settings gave me a video of 25 seconds when I dragged all images from the browser into the bottom pane of iMovie.
If you click on the image below you will be taken to the video on Flickr
Clearly if I had shot more frames per minute, the transitions would have been smoother as the flower opened. However I wasn’t originally planning a movie. I thought I had framed the flower to take into account any movement. But as you will notice I hadn’t. Hence the reason for the re-framing half-way through.
All in all, I’m very pleased with results and it made for an interesting experiment. What else would make a good subject for time lapse photography, and could I possibly use film? 🤨
arhphotographic 