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Time lapse of a plant growing
A friend of mine is growing bamboo in his garden. This particular type grows nearly a foot a day up to about 20 feet. I want to capture this on a time lapse but really have no idea the best way to go about it. I’ve done some time lapse work before but never something of this duration (could be up to 20 days) and of this size (could be up to 20 feet). What are your suggestions?
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5 Replies
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Boinx istopmotion will also do time lapse, run it from a firewire or usb-enabled still or video camera. This is a plug and play solution, see their web page for examples.
I would say use a digital SLR for this, plugged into the boinx software, but any digital still camera of 2 megapixels or better will give you a nice result, and you can even use webcams. Put everything on a backed-up AC power supply. Some DSLR’s have an intervalometer setting built into them already, maybe you’re lucky and have one.
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I would go with the DSLR, shoot in the biggest size. That way you could be well over 3 times the size of HD. That way if the tree doesn’t go as tall as you think it will you can zoom in on the content.
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Here is a third vote for using a DSLR rather than a traditional video camera. There are many reasons why: better and cheaper are primary.
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The other is that, unlike using the DSLR with a buch of add-on gear to shoot motion video, you are just using the still camera as it was initially designed to be used: to shoot single frames, BIG. Stack those frames together, you have the time lapse, and you’ve captured it in a high enough res that you can pan and zoom around in the composition in post to fine-tune it.
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For a perfect result you need to cover the entire site with a tent to exclude natural light, and put in lights – a growing light set and a shooting (flash) light setup to take the frames.
That’s how they do outdoor insitu jobs where you can’t grow the thing in a studio against a blue screen.
Which is why it’s not done very often on something tall like a bamboo tree !
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