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The Bay Area has seen some very interesting weather in the last few weeks. We’ve seen way more than average rainfall and below normal temperatures. I’ve been feeing bad about not getting out to shoot some pictures of the snow, the rainbows or gorgeous fluffy clouds we so rarely see in the Bay Area. Well, this morning I came up with a way to capture some of our weird weather without getting wet - or even leaving my chair!

First, I grabbed the current weather image every sixty seconds from to the Lawrence Hall of Science WebCam using wget on one of my Linux boxes. This camera produces much better image quality than the average webcam, and it would be difficult to find to a more scenic overview of the Bay Area.

After I had gathered up a few hundred Images, I used the powerful and cool Graphic Converter on my wife’s Mac Mini to produce a Quicktime movie of a day’s worth of spectacular Bay Area weather. The results are so awesome that I will definitely do this again!

I made a second time-lapse while in Manila, hoping to catch the controlled chaos that is Manila traffic. I pointed the camera out of the sun roof of our vehicle and began snapping at what seemed like an opportune moment. I wanted to show how the traffic continues to move - albeit slowly. We rarely come to a complete stop despite the overcrowding. What you don’t see is how patient the drivers are with one another. People ignore lanes altogether and sometimes even drive against the flow, but I never heard a horn sounded in anger.

As luck would have it, traffic was lighter than it had been at any other time along this route, but once again, the results are pretty cool. I like to look at individual frames and check out the skyline and the hundreds of enormous billboards.

We had the opportunity to hang out on the 27th floor balcony of a building in the heart of Manila. I realized that this might be my one chance to shoot a time-lapse of the traffic, so I leaned the D2X and the monopod against the railing and started shooting. I had hoped for rush-hour traffic, but we arrived a bit early and had just 40 minutes in which to shoot the 1000 images needed to make this video. Traffic is not as heavy as I’d hoped, but the resulting video is still kinda cool.

I felt motivated this morning, so I mounted the camera in the back of the Jeep and captured this time-lapse video (10 meg QuickTime file) of my six mile commute to Affymetrix. I noticed on the drive home that the commute FROM work would probably be more interesting. I’ll try to shoot that tomorrow. :-)

Let’s see… that’s 1 frame per second x 15 frames per second playback speed, so time is accelerated 15 times. My 70 miles an hour is actually 70 x 15 = 1050 miles per hour. Not bad!

I finally finished a couple of time-lapse videos from our recent trip to Europe! I think they’re pretty cool. Of course, I was there, so they may not have the same impact on you, but I hope you’ll check them out anyway.

To create these, I zip-tied the camera on a monopod to the railing on the ship and set the camera’s built-in intervalometer to shoot 999 frames - one every three seconds. The videos compress 45 minutes into 40 seconds.

The first video was shot when we left Koln. The ship turns downstream at the beginning, and whizzes past the city and the Koln Cathedral on the left.

The second video was shot as we approached Dusseldorf. At the end of the video, the ship spins around and docks.