Fascination by plant movement and growth
How to make movies of plant growth?
- Buy a camera
I'm using Canon PowerShot A70. It works mostly well, except:
One cannot manually focus it in remote capture mode! A huge disadvantage!
Fortunately, at least you can trick it to focus on some point and then lock it in this position.
However, for some scenes this becomes unusable.
-
Find a software for remote capturing
Look at gphoto www.gphoto.org, which supports many cameras.
I'm using capture
utitilty, my code, which is based on
libptp2-1.0-pre7 and
ptpcanon.
It supports only those cameras, which are supported by libptpcanon.
-
Find a software which will make a movie from the captured images
I use mencoder www.mplayerhq.hu .
Downloads
All the software downloadable from this page is written for Linux.
It is open-source, licensed under GPL. Use it at your own risk!
- libptp
- capture-1.0.3.tgz - a tool for periodic capturing
with canon cameras. Commands can be specified as command
line parameters (useful for scripting) or can be entered
in an interactive mode. It can take a shot, set various properties of the camera,
open a viewfinder window (works like a webcam).
(Old versions: 0.1, 1.0.1,
capture-1.0.2.tgz)
A sample perl script which i use for long-term periodic capturing of
plant movement and growth is included.
The program was tested with cameras:
- Canon PowerShot S50
- Canon PowerShot A60
- Canon PowerShot A70
- Canon PowerShot A75
- Canon PowerShot A80
- Canon PowerShot A85
- Canon PowerShot A95
- Canon Digital IXUS 400 (aka PowerShot S400)
- Canon PowerShot S410
For the latest version of capture, please check the
Capture SourceForge project page
Movies
- Hibiscus coming into flower. Encoded with different codecs, some of them
should play on windows
Some other movies which were taken while testing the software:
- marantha-divxvkil.avi (5.6MB) - Marantha (also known as
the "prayer plant") and its every day's exercise.
- palma-divxvkil.avi (3.5MB) - Weight of water drops
makes a palm leaf to bend. As the water drops evaporate, the leaf sweeps back.
- narcis-divxvkil.avi (6.5MB) - Narcissus coming into flower.
Contact
