Preliminary note: I would have written this some time ago, but I’ve been beating my head against a wall trying to get YouTube videos to run in a window on this blog. So far, no go, so I must content myself with a lame hyperlink. Still, it’s cool stuff. Explanations follow.

When I was a kid, we had an 8mm movie camera that allowed stop-action shooting. In other words, you could shoot one frame at a time and make animated films. This particular camera also had a timer so you could have it take a frame automatically at specific intervals. It took digital cameras longer to catch up than I wanted, and to the best of my knowledge most video camcorders still can’t do this very cool trick.

But digital cameras have appeared that have the capability to do this. The only problem is that sometimes you have to use other software such as iMovie to take the collection of frames and turn them into a movie. That said, it’s a lot less trouble than taking the old 8mm film down to the drugstore to be sent out for processing.

A couple of weeks ago we had some very heavy rainstorms here in the Bay Area that caused some serious damage and knocked out power to a fair number of folks. We were spared that inconvenience, and moreover I used the occasion of the storm to test the time lapse capability of my trusty Olympus SP-350 digital camera. The film below was shot from the window of my office at Henley-Putnam University. I put the camera on a steady footing, set it to take a single frame every 60 seconds, and let it work it’s magic. Unfortunately, it will only do this for a maximum of 99 frames, so I had to repeat the process every hour and 39 minutes.

Here’s a link to a time lapse movie I made of storm clouds seen from my office window on 08 January 2008, looking west between 9:24 AM and 4:16 PM Pacific time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BgziRjRUEE

This one below was taken on 04 January, the day before a big storm in the Bay Area you might have heard about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmKO5HnGTNU

If you have a digital camera that lets you take time lapse movies–and you should, really–try messing around with it. You can have a lot of fun. What’s more interesting, to my mind, is that these kinds of little projects are trivial to do now. The average person has access to tools to access more of the universe in more detail than at any time in history. For a few hundred bucks you can buy a telescope with a computer controlled system that can find any object in the heavens that you would care to examine, and track it while you study it. To not take advantage of such amazing tools as these and many more is to truly deny yourself something wonderful.