Something I forgot to mention about Sunday: Catherine G., a 10-year work group compatriot, called to tell me she'd just seen a B-17 fly over her house at 500 feet. I was the first person she thought to call about it. I was turly touched. We caught up on news -- it had been quite a while -- before she had to return to her dad's birthday party. It was so good to hear from her.
Monday I dropped Aly off at her Taekwan-do class and went down to the Springhill Pro Shop to get a bucket of range balls. "One token?" I was asked. "??" says I. Come to find that the balls are dispensed at a shack at the range, and it takes funky-shaped tokens to get it to cough up the balls. One token costs $3.50. That works out to about ten cents a ball. So moments later I'm primed for my first golf club swing in maybe 10 years. My gods, I hit it cleanly, and straight! That was an enormous surprise! In the past I had a wicked slice if I hit the ball at all. For the day I did spectacularly well. Only five balls were duffed, including two worm-burners which went a fair distance. I think I'll drop a few more duckets there in the future while Aly is in class.
Tuesday I got to playing around with the idea of still-frame videos again. I got the idea from a Rocketboom episode a couple weeks ago. My first attempt was using my camera's built-in "flip animation" mode which can make small-format videos. I spent a little time taking pics of building thunderheads and making a short video using that capability. The results were a little disappointing. I went back to the Rocketboom episode comments page and found the videographer took a bunch of timed still photos and used something called VirtualDub to stitch them together into a video. I got the software (free) and installed it only to be confounded by its interface. Tuesday morning I found that the "Load video" menu allowed loading JPEGs. In the afternoon I got the bright idea of taking a series of stills of the shadows cast by the back deck overhead framework. I started taking pictures every 45 seconds. That got boring after a while, so I figured out how to involve myself -- use the self timer and position myself in frame. It's something I did with a single-frame 8mm camera years ago using an intervalometer to fire the shutter. Things became unboring at that point. Set the timer, press the shutter release, scramble to position, slightly different than the last, wait for time to expire and repeat. Altogether it took 112 minutes to get the stills.
I got them loaded into VirtualDub without problem, but the video it created wouldn't play. I messed with it some more this afternoon and discovered my error. The new video played, but was much too large to upload anywhere at 150MB. After a bit of pondering and messing around I got my five seconds of action into a small package. As bad as it is, here it is.
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2 comments:
Hey, that's pretty cool, are you going to do more?
I think I will, but without me in the frame. I'm thinking of going out to the reservoir when there is a fair number of sailboats and/or clouds building over the western side of the city and time-lapsing the scene at maybe one frame every 10-15 seconds. That could be interesting. The self-animation trick is tedious. Do you have any leanings towards time-lapse or pixellation (the old term for human animation)?
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