Or - Amaryllis vs Flaming Katy

2-minute read for the main post - 7 minutes total with tech tips at bottom

Last Saturday – in Part 1 of the Secret Life of Plants – we saw the multiple re-births of Hawaiian Punch.

This week we have a smack-down between the towering Amaryllis and the demure contender, Flaming Katy. Which one is your money on?

I tried to level the playing field by making the timelapse videos as similar as possible (for example, I kept them both just under 2 minutes), but there are some differences:

• The Amaryllis goes through a truly explosive growth-spurt at this time of year. During late Fall and Winter, it’s largely dormant, looking for all intents and purposes like a dead-bulb-in-a-pot. But from the time the first little green shoot peeks up from the middle of the brown bulb to the point where it’s in full bloom is usually less than two weeks.

• The Flaming Katy, on the other hand, grows at a much more sedate pace, and it seems less season-sensitive, putting out those bright orange blossoms most of the year (assuming it has enough warmth and light).

I also used two different “paces” and methods for the two videos:

• The Amaryllis was shot at 5-minute intervals, 24/7, over a 12-day period (2/29 – 3/11). Like the Hawaiian Punch, I used a flash to light it overnight, and this time I used the flash as fill during the day as well. Due to the longer intervals between shots, the Amaryllis seems to “move” faster, but that’s partly due to the fact that it does actually grow faster. To avoid as much of the “flicker effect” as possible, I cut out many of the day-night and night-day transitions.

• The Flaming Katy was shot at 1-minute intervals, during daylight hours only, over a 16-day period (1/20 – 2/5) – there was no artificial light “supplementing” the exposures. When I stitched all 16 days’ worth of footage together, I came up with over 6 minutes of video. There were several minutes at a time when there was very little growth and movement, so I ended up cutting over 4 minutes out of the original.

Despite these differences, you still get a good feel for the life cycle of these two very different plants.

The Amaryllis is like a peacock, all showy and noisy and look-at-me-now.

The Flaming Katy – despite the provocative name – is more demure and dignified (hence the choice of Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” as the musical accompaniment). Even so, she puts on a very interesting, undulating dance at times as she strains toward the light.

Here are the two videos – add a comment at the bottom to vote for your favorite:

A final quick “tech-thought” (not really a “tip” per se) for the photo-lapsers out there.

Last week I reviewed some of the challenges involved in shooting multi-day timelapse events with changing light intensity and white balance. The thumbnail image for this post shows what an unedited series of images might look like during a lighting period transition:

Another factor to consider when doing a lot of timelapses like I do is the wear and tear on equipment. Nikon makes incredibly robust and rugged cameras (as do most of the other manufacturers, I’m sure, but my experience is mostly with Nikon).

I often think of Nikons as the Honda of the camera world. Had my Nikkormat FT2 not been stolen out of my dorm room in college, I’m quite confident that I would still be shooting with it to this day. In fact, I’m still shooting with a Canon AE1 that was recently given to me, and that came out only a few years after the FT2 (so it’s over 35 years old at this point).

Nevertheless, every piece of electronic equipment has an expected lifespan. You measure the life expectancy of a camera by how many times the shutter has been actuated (like you’d look at how many miles a car has driven).

For some bizarre reason, most DSLRs and Mirrorless cameras do not have a built-in “odometer”. To track how many times the shutter has been fired, they use the much more convoluted and inconvenient method of including the shutter count in the metadata of every photo taken.

To determine that shutter count – a crucial piece of info if you’re buying a used camera, and a “good-to-know” number if you’re working with an older camera – you need to upload a recently-taken photo to any one of the many sites out there that will extract the metadata and display the shutter count for you.

I’m sure they’re all equally accurate, but the one I’ve used over the years is Camera Shutter Count.

The next thing you’ll want to do is look up the general life expectancy of your camera’s shutter, as rated by the manufacturer. You can either try to find the info on the camera maker’s website, or use a site like apolelyt.com, which will provide a searchable database.

Based on this, I have already exceeded the “mean time before failure” by over 65,000 shutter actuations. That’s why I call the D5300 (and Nikons in general) the Honda of cameras. Like a good Honda, I’m hoping to get upwards of 250,000 shutter clicks out of the camera. But you never know – it could die tomorrow without warning. (The second paragraph cracks me up a bit - that was obviously written by someone who does not do timelapses).

Even though timelapses – especially those shot indoors in a “controlled environment” – are the camera-equivalent of “highway miles”, every timelapse sequence you do will ultimately bring you closer that fateful, final shutter click when the camera waves the white flag and surrenders.

When my D5300 was getting close to the 100,000 shutter mark, I inquired at a local camera store (which will remain nameless at this point) about the cost of servicing. The guy behind the counter kinda gave me an “under-the-eyebrows” look and said,

“Yeah, no, we don’t bother with servicing anymore. Depending on the camera, it would probably be cheaper just to buy a new one. If you want to try and service an old camera [for purely nostalgic reasons, he seemed to imply], you’d have to send it off to the manufacturer. They’ll probably take two months to “clean” it for you, charge you $200 - $300 for the service, risk having it lost or damaged in transit, and you’ll have zero guarantees that that will have any effect at all on the overall life of the camera”.

Clearly, this gentleman is in the business of selling new cameras, so servicing old ones is obviously not in his best interests. Understanding that, I think he does actually have a fair point – up to a point. The point made in the second paragraph above is a valid one: there could be other reasons to replace an “end-of-life” camera than just reaching a certain number of shutter clicks. Right now, it probably would be less of a hassle for me to replace the D5300 with a new one (which you can get on Amazon with an 18-55mm kit lens for under $400) than trying to service it. But I don’t think that would be as valid for a high-end camera. A $5000 pro-body would be much cheaper to service and clean than to replace (assuming you could do without it for 6 – 8 weeks).

The point is, if you’re going to get into timelapses, and you are working with one camera only, you need to take into account how those timelapse projects will affect the overall life of the camera. This is the main reason why I kept the D5300 (instead of selling it) when I upgraded to the D810. Not only was my intention to dedicate the D5300 to timelapses, it also gave me the ability to shoot both timelapses and (higher-quality) stills during the same event. Of course, you’ll need a second tripod as well, but since it’s being used for a lighter camera, and it’s stationary the whole time, I just use an Amazon Basics tripod for my D5300 timelapses. For example, I would not have been able to do the Presidents Heads video without two cameras.

Thanks for reading this week’s blog post. Hope you enjoy the videos - vote for your favorite in the comments below!

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