More fun than watching paint dry

Re: More fun than watching paint dry

Brad Vietje

Nice application of time-lapse photography -- thanks, John. I'd like to see this applied to Madrone, Lilac, and some of those English Brown Oak thin-wall bowls done by Anthony Bryant... would be great to compare different woods.

I'd be happy to do something like this when I get a camera again (and in Spring, when it warms up again!)

Safe spinning,

Brad Vietje

Newbury, VT

Re: More fun than watching paint dry

john lucas

many many years ago a guy had a bunch of what sort of looked like cake platters but they were very thin and extremely warped. He called them potato chip bowls. They were at my local gallery and didn't sell worth a darn. That was very early in my turning career and I didn't know what kind of wood it was but they sure did warp. Much more than the one in that photo.

I rough turned some wisteria vine one time and it warped so bad I couldn't put them back on the lathe.

time lapse, etc

John K Jordan

I'd like to try some time lapse too. I bought an intervalometer to use with my Canon 70D which worked well when I did a test. Somewhere I've seen some amazing time lapse sky rotation videos.

I did some time lapse when I worked at the Oak Ridge lab. I was asked to document a LARGE ($2.2 billion) project so I had several computer-controlled cameras taking pictures of key areas night and day, sun or snow. I went through 10s of thousands of pictures manually to cull the worthless and made a number of time lapse videos, both slow and frantic. It's fun to watch dirt moved, concrete poured, and buildings go up in high speed!

We mounted one camera with remote pan hardware and programmed it to take a set of 18 overlapping high-res photos every day over years of construction.

As well as slow time lapse I was able to make some high-quality panoramas - every 6 months I made a new one, printed it 10' long and added to the sequence. This pano was a bit tricky since the camera by necessity had to be aimed down some from the horizontal, requiring an "unwarping" transformation on the image. Here's an early panoramic when much of the underground work was in progress (tunnels being built for a superconducting particle accelerator/accumulator, underground for radiation shielding):

With a little Photoshop magic I warped panos into a seamless circle - made a nice DVD label for my regular construction update videos!

Good clean fun.

JKJ

Re: time lapse, etc

john lucas

The Students at Tennessee TEch built a Habitat for Humanity house just across the street from our Fitness Center. I built a water proof housing for a cheap camera we purchased that had time lapse capability. We took a photo every 10 minutes for the entire build and then put it together.

It's really fun watching students who have never held a hammer try to put 16 penny nails in the joists. They hold the hammer about 2" from the head and then tap tap tap. I finally showed them that they had to hit it like they were mad at it.

Do you have that on YouTube somewhere?