Flowers Blooming

I've always been intrigued by those movies that speed up action by taking a lot of pictures over a long time and cram them together. They're usually something like plants growing. So I made one.

Let's go back a bit. I recently agreed to do an interview for a company and provided feedback on their new website design. For a fee, of course. They paid me $200 for my lunch hour in the form of an Amazon credit. This money was burning my pockets (as my dad used to say), so I spent some of it on a wireless camera that you link via WiFi and can control and view over the web.  I bought this one. I'll put in a picture cause the link will quit working some day. It costs $110.  Of course, as soon as I bought it, it went down to $99.

I can't figure out what to do with it exactly. We originally mounted it in the garage and pointed it at my wife's tomatoes to see if we could figure out what was eating them. Turned out it was birds.

It doesn't have the highest quality picture but there are a lot of nifty things you can do with it after spending days reading the instructions which you actually have to go looking for on the web. One thing you can do is have it take a picture at regular intervals and send them by ftp to some server if you have an account. I happen to have a GoDaddy account that I use for all kinds of crap like this. Then I take all the pictures and cram them into a movie.

Recently my wife got these neat flowers from the guy who does our next-door neighbors yard. They're big white flowers that bloom when it gets dark and collapse the next day around 10 in the morning. After making sure that I had an adequate WiFi signal in the yard, I set up the camera near sundown and pointed it at the flowers. I set it to take a picture every minute and then left it alone. This is my first shot at it. You have to look fast.

The flowers are definitely cooler than my movie making.