More than 300 15" exposures, taken 45 seconds apart.

Song is "one bird".

There are at least two meteors in there. Maybe they're planes. I can't tell.

The trees there aren't the greatest to look at. But, they're what's in front of the only window without screens. I'm wary of leaving the camera outside...

(Updated with better video)

The moon was rockin last night, so I pointed my D90 out the window on the front door and set it to take 100 frames, 8 seconds each, one minute apart. And then I went to bed.

We've been watching a lot of horror movies lately, so I was a little worried I'd look at the pix this AM see some zombies or ghosts or vampires lurking around the door. Instead...

...deer.

(You can also see the solar-powered lights along the driveway start to fade out towards the end.)

This is roughly 1500 frames from my D90, taken via my nifty new little Pearstone ShutterBoss intervalometer (tells the camera to take a shot every N seconds). The frames were pre-processed with ThumbNailer, then stitched together with Adobe Premiere. Taken, last weekend, Beaufort Inn, Beaufort, NC.

Song is called "Zendos"^*. It's me.

It's actually available in HD, if you want to get the full experience of sitting on the boat slip, then looking out the hotel room window.

No, it's not great, but it was fun. Maybe someday I can find something better to use this tech for.

* - nothing to do with "Zen". promise.

Sullivan had a video on his blog over the weekend (which I'm too lazy to go look up): a stop-motion movie about some mean girl Barbies which was created with a Nikon D60 and some software to stitch all the stills together. Inspired, I set out to see if I could make my own.

I did!

My original goal was to write my own software to stitch the hundreds of JPGs together (easy), using my own (to be invented) tweening algorithm to smooth out the between-frame transitions (hubris). Instead, I used a trial version of Adobe Premier.

As far as story goes... there really isn't one. I just grabbed some stuff off a shelf and made it go. The first 2/3s is the last "shoot" I did, in daylight; the last 1/3 was done the night before, in the room's compact fluorescent lighting. I just stuck them together to reach the length of the song I wanted to use.

Technically, it has a lot of problems. But I know what they are: inconsistent lighting, rough camera motion, inattention to detail, etc.. So, in theory, I could do better next time - don't rely on daylight, set the camera's white balance before starting, don't try subtle camera motion with the tripod or its swivel ball head, slow down a lot for slow shots, sweep the floor for low shots, etc.. And maybe I'll try again someday.

But, what I really learned was this: now that I'm 40, I shouldn't spend all day rolling and crawling around on the floor, pushing toy cars and Star Wars figurines like an 8 year old. My legs and back are sore as fuck today.