Photography - Time lapse camera

Someone nice gave me a new camera today.

Thanks someone nice.

It does time lapse photography.

You set it to take a shot every 30 seconds or whatever (30 seconds to 990 minutes), and when you feel like it, you turn it off pull out the memory card, and knit them all together with some software * so you have a movie.

It looks like this.

I've played around with it a bit, and so far the results are excellent.

It was given to me, so I have no idea how much it cost, but they tend to be called "garden cams". A search for "garden cam" will see you on the right track.

With a name like that, clearly they want me to film some aquaponics growth.

Mine is made in china and the box is labelled "Live Cam".  If you do a search for "Live Cam", you get a list of every porn site in the world.




I cant endorse it, or any of the garden cam things mentioned, because I dont know how much mine cost, I haven't used any others, and I never said I would, but I'm pretty stoked at having one to play with. From the size of the jpg's it makes, It's around a three mega pixel camera, so it should make for a reasonably decent film. It's not going to be Imax or anything, but it should be a few million times better than your average liquor store hold up security camera footage.

I suspect it will end up pointing aft, mounted on the back of my little boat for the duration of my planned, epic Murray River adventure.

I've really got to get to work on that boat.

Anyway, this version has a micro SD card slot which means it can hold up to 32 gig of pictures. I just worked out how many 4 meg photo's that is, but I closed the calculator without looking at the result, and I never go back.

So...

You'll have to work that out for yourselves.

It should hold a day's worth, and hopefully the batteries will also last a day at least. I suspect the camera goes into a sleep mode (otherwise the 990 minute setting would be a little pointless) where it doesn't draw a lot of power, but I'll be taking my trusty laptop (that was ripped from the jaws of landfill, and must be 20 years old), so charging (via USB) and emptying the memory shouldn't be an issue. Although, come to think of it, I think the new camera has more memory than the old laptop.

I'll work something out.

On a side note, and interestingly, you can drag a photo of a product into a web page showing google images, and it will search the net for images that match. I recently used it to find all the different labels that my new tent is manufactured under to see how much I got ripped off. (turns out I didn't)

But generally speaking it's a good thing to do before you buy rather than after to see if you got ripped off.

So, if you want to buy a toaster that burns tomorrows weather forecast into your toast, the same device might be marketed under three different labels, at three different price points. The exact same device, made in the same factory, not some kind of poorer quality knockoff.

It's a crazy, crazy world in which we live.

So get the photo, and save it to your desktop, then open google search, then click "images". ie go to google image search. Now grab your pic from the desktop, or another browser tab (you don't have to save it to your desktop (in chrome at least), and drag it into google image search.

It will find all the other versions and brands of your product that are using the same, or similar promotional pics.

Try it with the next product you buy, and depending on where you shop, you may be pleasantly surprised, or utterly disgusted with the universe at large.

You can also try it with a person's image, but it might make you sad. Most peoples's secret lives are very, very, boring.

Stupid universe.




*I use OpenShot Video Editor - a free, open-source video editor for Linux licensed under the GPL version 3.0





120 Things in 20 years - Photography - Time lapse camera. We humans are just like ants, but with no sense of humour.