American in Spain

This is what passes for snow down here at sea level in Northern Spain. It did actually stick to the hillside you can see through the window for almost 24 hours.
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Just like any of you men out there would do if you really loved your wives, as a birthday present for my wife yesterday, I aligned the moon and the planets. You know, just to show her I care.
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It’s that time of year again, as the hour hand approaches the six, my computer screen is showered with sunshine, forcing me to lower the shutters. During the warmer months, there is a building blocking the sun from entering my office, but the analemma of the sun has moved it far enough south at sunset that its rays invade my workspace. Yesterday, I had a premonition that it might be a good idea to set up my camera pointing west. I was right.
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A couple days ago, I heard a low rumble in the distance. When I heard it a second time, I knew what it was, so I rushed to the balcony to retrieve the clothes from the clothes line (yes, that’s how we dry our clothes in Spain). The sky was a turbulent dark mass of churning water vapor. Electrical storms are fairly rare here, compared to where I grew up, so I jumped at the opportunity to attempt some lightning photography. I ran to fetch the tripod, camera, and timer, and carried them all upstairs. The problem was that the storm was coming from the south, and the only windows I had available were east and west. I chose east, and pointed the camera to the southeast, hoping that the storm would pass on that side of the house. I set the camera for automatic shutter speed and to take photographs every five seconds. And I waited…
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Several days of my summer vacation in Extremadura were spent tackling the huge mess that was my wife’s grandfather’s attic: a lifetime of “this could be useful later!” items and the dust they have collected over the years. I learned the trick of splashing some water on the floor before sweeping to avoid being suffocated by airborne particulates. Very handy.

We ended up throwing away almost everything in the attic. The first two days, we just moved it all to one side of the attic, and then we finally moved it down outside to be discarded the next morning. (more…)

During the first few days of my summer vacation, I spent some sleepless nights. To take my mind off my troubles, I spent quite a bit of time outside in the corral (an open area behind the house) gazing up at the cloudless night sky.

The following photo is a one-hour exposure looking towards Polaris about which the celestial sphere appears to rotate. I still don’t know what made the colored dots that can be seen on the full-sized version. It must be dust or debris on either the lens or CCD sensor (like “film” to you old folks). Or maybe some other kind of signal noise.
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This video is pretty much everything I want to be able to do with nature-related timelapse photography. Unbelievable.
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Over the past weekend, I took three different timelapse videos of my flowering cactus over three separate evenings. The results are quite lovely. Each frame was captured as a 5.7 MiB, 1944×1296 pixel, “small RAW” file, I sized them down to the maximum HDTV dimensions of 1920×1080 before loading them into iMovie. In order to upload them with maximum quality to my .Mac account, the only place I know of that will host large videos, I had to use the new iMovie ’08. As it turns out they only allow up to 960×540, which is really plenty. For iMovie ’08, Apple completely rewrote iMovie to an overly userfriendly interface. It’s the only video editing software I’ve ever seen that doesn’t offer a “timeline” view where you can move video and audio around. This caused a great backlash (from me as well) at the time of its release, so Apple allowed the older version, iMovie HD, to be a free download to owners of iMovie ’08. However, I must say that after using iMovie ’08 today, it’s really not that bad. They took away control over some aspects of the editing and provided more control in others. One thing that always annoyed me about iMovie HD was that once you added a text title to the movie, it was there for good, rendered and saved to each frame, and couldn’t be edited. Not so in ’08.
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Now this is a timelapse flower movie! Four hours and thirteen minutes, one photograph every minute. I’m so pleased with the result! The animation is smooth and perfectly captures nature’s beauty. What’s rather amazing is that there is motion between every single frame. The cactus never spent a full minute motionless. Absolutely gorgeous!
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For whatever reason, cramped space, climate change, low rainfall (aka. negligent watering), etc., the cactus is flowering late this year. In anticipation of the flowers, I took my photography up to the next level by purchasing a real professional tripod. One of the problems I saw in the Cactus Cam videos from 2007 was that, since the cactus was outside, the wind and varying sunlight made the video flicker and jump like the early days of cinema. I want to show smooth growth and flower blooming. With this in mind, I moved the cactus indoors, right inside the window ledge he’s used to occupying, and set up the tripod with my expensive DSLR trained on our prickly subject. This is a huge improvement over the 320×240 resolution my 7-year-old webcam was giving us last year.
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