Little Porch of Horrors: The Sequel

I’m not going to quit until I get this right. Or something.

I tried my hand at a timelapse sequence of a blooming hibiscus about a week ago. The sequence was OK, but my camera’s battery pooped out before the bloom opened completely.

Yesterday, a new camera housing arrived, one that will allow me to connect the camera to a power source, and so I arranged things this morning to once again try to capture the full blooming sequence.

I got closer…well, actually, I got too close. I did get the whole blooming sequence, but as it turned out, the GoPro video camera needs a bit more space between it and the main subject. What I ended up with was a series of slightly out of focus photos, until the flower opened almost fully, at which time the camera figured out what it should be focusing on.

So, I needed to get a little creative in order to mask the poor quality of the initial photos. I did this by cropping and reducing the size of the photos, then converting the initial shots to black and white, with the latter effect being gradually faded through the timelapse sequence. Here’s the result:

I really shouldn’t worry too much about the quality of the photos, since the GIF format that’s required for the animation dictates a significant loss of quality anyway. I do like the idea of applying different effects to the frames through the sequence of the animation, so if you’re getting tired of seeing these things, I have bad news for you. The boredom will continue until you get interested.