FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

For a while I've had interest in shooting time lapse photos of plant growth, and have been doing some research into inexpensive cameras that can do it well. The interesting thing is that very, very few point and shoots (or DSLRs for that matter) have the capacity, by default, to shoot time lapse. And those that do oftentimes have really idiotic restrictions, like a max of 100 shots. Which is nothing.

So, I ended up buying a couple of HP Photosmart 618 cameras, which went on the market in 2000, featuring a whopping 2.1 megapixels. Which is actually far more than enough for timelapse. You could actually do 1080p time lapse video, with resolution to spare.

Today's test shot was of a Drosera Binata that decided to pop out of one of my flytrap pots under a humidity dome. I shot at 800x600 (the lower resolution setting), with the middle quality setting ("better"), as I wanted to see what it could do with the crappy 32MB card it came with (I have several 2 gig cards, but I was curious). It did surprisingly well. I'm quite impressed, actually. Not a bad little camera (it retailed for 600 bucks when it was new).

One exposure was shot every two minutes, and the video runs at 24 frames a second, with each second representing 48 minutes. The video ends a few frames after one of my cats knocked the damn tripod over, ending things a bit earlier than I had planned. So, only seven or eight seconds, but I like it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDTilDAOA2Y

Take a look at the grass on the bottom left, btw.

Very, very cool. I need to get a setup like that.

thanks one of the best ive ever seen, maybe try a week

That's pretty cool!

kevinqwe wrote:thanks one of the best ive ever seen, maybe try a week

There's two problems. One, you waste a lot of shots during the dark hours. Two, I would have to move the camera in order to follow the growth. I'll think on it.

Here's a video that lasts over a month, but no shots were taken at night and it still goes by pretty seamlessly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3Y2jCBlx9g

Nickrober wrote:Here's a video that lasts over a month, but no shots were taken at night and it still goes by pretty seamlessly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3Y2jCBlx9g

I remember seeing this a while ago. After I saw someone's VFT timelapse, I looked up Nepenthes time lapse, and that was one of the ones I watched. With something like that nepenthes pitcher formation, I probably would have bumped up the frame rate to 30 fps so that I could use more exposures, and keep it a bit more fluid. And when the camera had to be shifted, I would have done it gradually, between exposures. Just because I'm uptight like that.

Today I'm shooting a Drosera Adelae, but I think I caught it between really active days of new leaf formation. A couple new ones popped out, and the ones curled up at the center didn't oblige me and release today.

This is a video I shot a few days ago of my adelae. It's over a period of about two and a half days. There are a couple jumps where no images were shot during dark hours. One image was taken every minute, and the video runs 24 frames per second, as usual.

It's kind of interesting to see the leaf unfurl and drop and slowly lift and then unfurl some more and drop again... like it lost pressure every time it unfurled. During the filming, I let the pan of water it was sitting in dry so I could transfer it neatly to a new terrarium I got (which was actually covering the camera so my cats wouldn't knock it over) and one of the roots that are sticking out of the bottom of its pot sprouted leaves...

And I've got a Binata blossoming.

Edit: Just realized the video I linked here is the wrong one. An old one that sucked. Let me upload the video to youtube, and then I'll link it.

Looking forward to seeing it.

Looking forward to see the new video.

I've been trying to do some research about digital cameras and time lapse. I'm looking to buy a relatively inexpensive camera, but it takes a lot of patience to sort through all the junk that returns from google & ebay searches.

Nickrober wrote:Looking forward to see the new video.

I've been trying to do some research about digital cameras and time lapse. I'm looking to buy a relatively inexpensive camera, but it takes a lot of patience to sort through all the junk that returns from google & ebay searches.

The new video is up here.

I spent a long, long time looking at digital cameras and finding an affordable option. You definitely want to use a point and shoot, which limits your options, but SLRs simply don't handle lots of shutter clicks well. If you want to use a newer digital camera, you could buy one of the Canon Powershot cameras that are compatible with the CHDK hack. Which isn't actually a hack. It's an extension of the camera's operating system that lives on an external memory card, which the camera boots off of. You can download different add-on features that people have created to use with CHDK, including a time lapse function.

I chose to try and find a camera that handled time lapse natively, which, if you want to spend less than a hundred bucks, forces you to go realllly old school. I found someone on eBay selling a TON of HP Photosmart 618 cameras (they're still on there) for 15 dollars plus 8 dollars shipping. The problem was, they didn't include AC adapters, so I had overlooked the cameras for a long time (you really don't want to do time lapse with the camera running off the batteries). I did a bunch of research, and found a couple places selling the adapters cheap (be very careful, I found a couple Casio cameras that were cheap, but then I found that the AC adapters cost a fortune).

So I bought two of the Photosmarts, and I just bought an Epson PhotoPC 850z off of Craigslist. It's in the mail (yay). The HP cameras came out in 2000, and the Epson came out in '99. Buying them necessitated the purchase of a few CompactFlash memory cards, as I only had SD and MicroSD cards lying around. So I'm out a few bucks, but no biggie. All told, the two Photosmarts and their adapters cost me a total of seventy bucks after shipping. :shrug:

Nice video.

After some research I've found that it's hard to get any camera for around $100. Although, this website has helped my search quite a bit http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/compare.asp

I'll keep looking.

Nickrober wrote:Nice video.

After some research I've found that it's hard to get any camera for around $100. Although, this website has helped my search quite a bit http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/compare.asp

I'll keep looking.

That is the exact site that was very helpful for me. I came across it because it kept popping up when I was googling a lot of stuff involving the phrase "time lapse." The best way to use that feature search function is to set the following options:

Format: Compact [at the very top, eliminates the SLRs]
Effective pixels: <= 6 million [second from the top, this eliminates a lot of the more recent and more expensive cameras]
Timelapse recording: Yes [this one is obvious]
Only Current: Don't Mind [At the very bottom. It's on "Yes" by default. Changing it to "Don't Mind" allows it to return listings for cameras that are discontinued, but which can be found on eBay and the like.]

Something to remember -- you don't need a very new camera. Even 720p video is only 1280x720, which is less than one megapixel. And most new cameras don't have time lapse options (also referred to as interval timer or interval mode), or have really stupid limitations, like a maximum of 100 shots, or only shooting time lapse in a crappy movie mode, at a bad interval setting (1 frame per second is rather common, strangely).

Do your homework.