I’ve been messing around with a Powertoy from MicroSoft that lets you take timed images with a webcam. I’d been wanting to try time lapse stuff for ages, so when I found out about the Powertoy a few weeks back I kept it in mind to have a go.
My first attempt was during the daytime, pointing the camera out of our upstairs front window from about 11am until late afternoon, with the delay initially set at five minutes, although I reduced it to two minutes after an hour or so.
The results weren’t great, to be honest, mostly due to the original delay setting being too long, but it did improve over the stretch with the lower delay. It was interesting to see the shadows creep across the ground, and you could follow the movement of the clouds on the two minute delay. Even so, I thought a night time one would be cooler, so last night I gave that a try.
Turns out not a lot happens at night, so although I set it to take pictures from around midnight onwards, I ended up not using the stretch from midnight to 3am when I created the movie, as virtually nothing happened early on. Here’s a movie showing 3am until just after 8am this morning.
I could probably have chopped out 3am to 5am with very little difference, but I’ve left it in there for now. I hadn’t noticed before that the streetlamp opposite the house has some kind of disco effect going on, or that it gets light so quickly around here. Still, night time turns out to be less cool than first thought.
Next I want to try another daytime one, and something a little less intrusive to other peoples’ privacy than shooting out of the front window, like my back garden, for example. I have read that taking images in a southerly direction isn’t good for the camera due to the bright sunlight, so I’ll need to come up with some kind of shade for it if I do attempt that.
Along with the Powertoy I’m using Roxio Easy Media Creator, which Fliss has been using to make wedding dvd’s, to put the images together, although MicroSoft Movie Maker, the latest version of which comes with the infamous service pack 2, will do the trick for free.
