Post 6 - The Secret Life of Plants - Part 1
Or - The Reincarnations of Hawaiian Punch….
5-minute read for the main post - 15 minutes total with tech tips at bottom
Spring has already sprung in March - inside my apartment. Outside the trees are still bare and it’s in the mid-40’s (F). On the left, my camera is trained on an Amaryllis that’s blooming (I’ll post that in Part 2 coming soon). Note the sheet of paper used as a light diffuser and to block the distracting background. Some of my various other plants - guarded by Shiva - are on the shelf. The plant on the right (2nd from the end) is the Hawaiian Punch getting ready to spread forth in yet another reincarnation, and while the last bloom is still withering in place, there are more buds waiting in the wings.
I’ll admit - that title is a bit overused at this point.
“The Secret Life of Plants” is the title of books, movies, articles, and an album by Stevie Wonder, among other things, I’m sure. But it’s such a great, descriptive, title, I couldn’t resist using it.
Plants are so fascinating because they exist on a radically different timescale from humans. If plants had eyes, we would probably seem like little more than ghostly blurs to them, the way we go streaking and stuttering through our daily lives. The only time we would slow down enough for them to get a quick glimpse of our solid form is when we’re sleeping - and even then we toss and turn enough in the night that we would probably look like some freaky supine Energizer bunny restlessly oscillating in our beds.
To us, plants move at glacial speeds - we usually only notice their growth when seeing them after several days - and we never see them actually move in our “real time”. Until you speed them up with a timelapse sequence. Only then, with days or weeks compressed into seconds or minutes, do their secret dancing gyrations manifest themselves, and their blooming petals seem to explode before our eyes.
Apart from their sheer visual interest, timelapses have actually taught me quite a bit about the habits of plants. They’re really not as dumb as they look. I’m not saying their sentient in the same sense that we are, but they are sensitive to their environments on a level of which we are only dimly aware.
Case in point: the Hawaiian Punch, or hibiscus - the State Flower of Hawaii. My mother gave me a Hawaiian Punch plant a couple of years ago, and for about 18 months, I let it do its thing in the small, clay pot it came in. I watered it once a week, and put it out on the balcony in the summer, but that’s about it. It bloomed every so often, but not very frequently, and it was usually only one bloom at a time, with weeks in between blooms, even in the summer.
Last October, I moved the plant to a bigger pot (about 3 times the size of what it came in), packed the original root ball in fresh new topsoil, and added a couple of “plant spikes” (fertilizer). I then put it on the shelf by the big window at the back of my apartment, which has southern exposure, so it got a full dose of whatever winter sun there was.
After recovering from the initial shock of the move, it began to put all its energy into “putting on weight”: over a period of about three months it almost doubled in height. Then, about a month ago, it suddenly burst into song.
It started producing one bloom after another, like they were on an assembly line. I had never seen that many little pods popping out of the center, so I slapped my Nikon D5300 onto a tripod, and put the pot on the end of the shelf with a large piece of paper taped to the window to diffuse the light and block out the background (I had learned from previous attempts how distracting the background can be in a timelapse). From February 7th, 2020 through February 29th, I set the camera to shoot one frame every 5 minutes, around the clock. At night I relied on a flash to light the scene. The result of those efforts is below, but before you watch the video, let me point out one thing I learned about this plant while going through this project.
The reason I decided to run the camera all day and night is that I noticed long ago that the Hawaiian Punch mostly blooms at night. It was kind of frustrating to wake up in the morning after a bloom and realize that the cheeky little plant had “stealthed” me again, opening while I was “asleep at the helm”. What I didn’t realize until I watched this timelapse video is that it times the bloom to happen just minutes before dawn.
Even with the blinds drawn, it knows when the sun is about to rise and times its bloom perfectly, presumably to take advantage of the insects that will pollinate it in the mornings. It happens very quickly on the video, so you need to watch carefully. You can tell it’s night time because I close the blinds (to save my neighbors from the flash every 5 minutes). Watch as the blooms spread open, and you’ll see the first hint of dawn’s early blue light coming through the shades. Here are some timestamps on the video:
24 seconds - first bloom begins to accelerate, sun begins to rise at about 26 - 27 seconds, which would make the start of the bloom roughly 15 minutes before blue hour and maybe 30 - 45 minutes before sunrise
1:30 - second blooms begins - roughly 1:33, first light
2:39 - third bloom - roughly 2:41, first light (this one is slightly shorter since I had to cut out some of the flickering effect due to exposure variations)
I was blown away by the consistency of the timing, despite the lack of visual cues about impending sunrise. If the plant were outside, I could understand its ability to detect when the sun was about to rise, but it’s in a temperature-controlled environment (heated apartment) behind closed blinds. How does it know to open well before the light actually begins to change? There might be botanists out there who can explain this, but to my ignorance, this is just another example of The Secret Life of Plants….
For the Gallery associated with this post, I chose a single still image that went into the video and put it through the grinder - over and over. To see all the variations I came up with, CLICK HERE. Leave a comment in the Gallery and vote for your favorite - and your least favorite!
Here are some tech-tips for the photographers (or interested non-photographers) out there.
These are some of the things I have learned over the years, after doing hundreds of timelapse sequences.
You WILL NOT need fancy, expensive equipment. Timelapses are easy - anyone can do them. I have done timelapses on various smartphones before, including my Samsung Galaxy S5 and S8. Newer smartphones may have a timelapse or hyperlapse feature built in, but if not there are hundreds of apps available for free (or a nominal charge) that can add that functionality to your phone’s camera. Feel free to comment below or email me if you would like specific recommendations.
You WILL need the following features, regardless of what type of camera you use:
The ability to set the interval of shots. A basic intervalometer (either separate or built-in to your equipment) will give you that option. Something more full-featured will allow you set the start time and the total number of shots, but those features are not absolutely necessary. I bought the Neewer 6-in-1 Timer on Amazon, and it actually works better than the one built into my Nikon D5300 (and it’s compatible with several camera models). It also works well as a wired remote shutter release.
General rule of thumb for interval settings: the shorter the interval, the slower and smoother the motion will be. The longer the interval, the faster and “jerkier” the motion will be.
You will need to judge your interval based on the speed of your subject, and how long you want your timelapse sequence to be.
Remember that most video is compiled in either 24 frames per second (fps), or 30 fps. If your gear is automated (like on a phone camera), then you don’t need to worry about this. If you’re shooting stills that you will combine into a video, then you’ll need to do some basic math to figure out what interval you want and how many total frames you’ll need to shoot to get a final timelapse of the desired length.
For example, if you want a 10-second timelapse segment at 30 fps, you’ll need to shoot 300 frames. If you want to condense an hour of “real time” into 10 seconds of timelapse at 30 fps, you’ll need your interval to be 12 seconds. In other words: 12 seconds = 5 frames per minute = 300 frames in 60 minutes.
If you’re like me, and you don’t want to do all that pesky math, there are tons of apps out there (for Android and iOS) that will do it for you (as will some high-end cameras). Here’s an example of what the PhotoPills Timelapse Calculator looks like (it will even tell you the total space required on your memory card, if you enter the average file size of each shot):
You will also need the following:
The ability to lock the focus (available on many photo apps for phones), and on most interchangeable lens (ICL) cameras (i.e., DSLRs and Mirrorless). Enabling the auto-focus causes an annoying “warbling” effect (sort of like an oscillating zoom), as the camera “hunts” for focus. You also risk losing focus on the main subject if the background changes. I have added a brief snippet below of previous auto-focus failures to demonstrate the point.
The ability to set the white balance (WB) - aka color temperature - manually. Again, this feature is available on many phone camera apps and most ICL cameras. This may not be necessary if the color temperature of your light source will be constant, but under most conditions, that may not be possible.
The Hawaiian Punch segment above is a case in point. It was shot in my living room, so at some point in the evening, I had to turn on the lights. The color temperature of halogen, incandescent, and fluorescent lighting is very different from daylight. Unfortunately, those tonal and tint changes can contribute to a sort of “flicker effect” in the final video. Despite my best efforts to mitigate that in post, in the end, the only option I had was to edit-out the worst flickering parts in the final cut of the video.
If you’re dealing with a multi-day event, there will be bright, sunny days (daylight WB setting), and cloudy, overcast days (overcast or shade WB setting). If you allow the camera to choose the WB setting as the conditions change, you could get radically different color casts and tints in your subject, which could be as challenging to correct in post as artificial light.
It’s best to choose the WB setting that will apply to most of the light conditions in your scene, and try to fix the rest as best as you can in post. In the case of the Hawaiian Punch video, I shot 24/7 and used a flash overnight, which is reasonably close to a daylight WB setting, so that’s what I chose. The different color temps on other lighting was a minimal part of the shoot, and I either tried to smooth those out manually, or I cut that footage from the video.
Side note: if you use Lightroom, beware of the “Match Total Exposure” feature. Although it works well under certain conditions, it proved to be utterly inadequate to the task when trying to smooth exposure and WB from day to night. It produced some bizarre results when I tried it, which I had to invariably undo, so I gave up on it after a while.
The ability to choose an auto-exposure priority is a definite plus, but maybe not absolutely crucial, depending on your subject matter. Your choice of exposure priority will depend on your subject and the changing light conditions.
If you’re shooting something with a constant, unchanging light source, then I would recommend setting the exposure in full manual mode, and leaving it there - but those are probably going to be rare circumstances.
Remember that changing the aperture, changes the depth of field. If your subject has a lot of depth to it, it could be very distracting if your camera is constantly changing the aperture as the light changes, thus causing the background to go in and out of focus throughout the sequence.
Changing the shutter speed will allow for motion blur or freeze the frame. Use this factor to your advantage, especially if transitioning from day to night, or vice versa. But keep in mind that as it gets darker out, the increase in shutter speed could have a huge effect on things like stars and clouds, etc. Most apps/cameras max out at a 30-second shutter speed, and at that speed stars could begin to leave slight “trails”, and clouds could begin to blur, depending on wind conditions. This could be good or bad, depending on the effect you want to achieve.
A changing shutter speed will also cause the motion to appear to speed up and slow down in a “time dilation effect” as you transition from day to night, or night to day.
The interval becomes an important factor here too. If, for example, you set the interval to take a shot every 15 seconds, and you transition from day to night, by the time your camera starts getting over the 15-second shutter speed mark, it will begin shooting “continuously”. In other words, the timer will trigger a new shot every 15 seconds, and if your shutter speed is 20 seconds, a new shot will be initiated the instant the old one is done, there will no longer by any 15-second gap.
This is clearly evident in the short snippet of overnight footage I’ve included below. Watch, also, how the timestamp in the lower right corner speeds up and slows down as a result of the changing shutter speed.
If you’re using an ICL (DSLR/Mirrorless) camera that is shooting individual photos, you will need some editing software to stitch those frames into a video. Photoshop does it quickly and easily, and many video editing programs have that function. Comment below or send me an email if you’d like tips on how to use Photoshop for this purpose.
One word of caution: some higher-end cameras will have timelapse features built in, but be careful when using those. For example, my Nikon D810 has two options:
Interval timer shooting - this is purely an intervalometer that shoots individual photos. You can shoot in any format you want (RAW or JPG, at various resolutions), you can time the start, and the number of frames, and you can even enable “exposure smoothing”. But you end up with separate photos that you can either use on their own, and/or stitch into a video (with separate editing software).
Time-lapse photography - this automates the process completely, taking the individual frames and stitching them directly into a video in-camera. This is great, unless you WANT individual photos as well. When I first got the camera, I didn’t understand the difference, and shot a timelapse thinking I could still recover the individual frames after the fact, so I didn’t bother shooting any stills of the scene. I learned the hard way later that there were no stills to be had - the camera discards the stills once it stitches them into a video. That was the first - and last - time I ever used that option. So if your camera has similar features, make sure you understand the difference, and what you’re getting into with each option.
Finally, some basic practical tips:
Try to move the camera, or the subject (as the case may be), as little as possible. This is more important the longer the time period. Even the slightest movement of camera or subject will be obvious in the final video. Obviously ignore this if you’re using a motorized slider rail or pan/tilt gimbal - but if you have fancy, expensive equipment like that you probably don’t need the advice on this page anyway… : -)
Make sure you have a good, sturdy tripod that won’t sag or drift over time - lock down the ball head and all joints tightly
Have extra batteries - and a charger - available. Depending on the frequency of frames, you may need to change batteries every couple of hours to once every day or two
Many cameras offer a device that can be inserted into the battery compartment and then plugged in to the wall, but they’re often ridiculously expensive. Nikon’s option for the D5300 is almost $100, and I’m just not willing to spend that when I can just as easily swap out batteries, but that might be an option for you to look into
Here is an example of the “warbling” effect I described above when you keep the auto-focus on - note how the video sort of “zoom oscillates” when it loses focus
Here is an example of the “time dilation” effect I describe above. The interval is set to 10 seconds, and during daylight hours, there is no problem with that. Overnight, as the shutter speed begins to exceed 10 seconds, the pace of the video (as borne out by the timestamp in the lower right corner) begins to speed up since the camera is now shooting fewer frames every minute, and it’s shooting those frames continuously (there is no longer a 10-second gap between frames). As the sun rises, the video speed (and timestamps) slows down as the shutter speed increases, and the 10-second gap is “reinstated”.
If you’ve never done a timelapse before - give it a try! They’re a lot of fun, and can reveal the world in ways you’d never guess.
I’ll leave you with a goofy little experiment I did years ago with melting M&M’s….who knew that the “m” would lift off and float?
Just playing around with melting M&Ms in a plate of water - any swirling effects you see are me blowing on the water, either with a straw or some canned air
Thanks for reading my blog post! If you found the tech tips above helpful, or you have any advice to add, leave a comment below. The Secret Life of Plants - Part 2 - is in the works. As soon as the Amaryllis is done blooming, I’ll post that as well.
If you have a moment, please help me improve the site by filling out this quick survey - CLICK HERE
9 questions, average time - 2 mins. All responses are anonymous and confidential. Thank you!
Share! Feel free to share this page with your friends! Copy and paste the link, or use one of the buttons below:
https://www.cameralingua.com/blog/post-6-secret-life-of-plants-1
Thanks again!
