Timelapse footage from the site... seasons changing, homes rising

There's lots to be said for a diverse community. Most of us looked at the telegraph pole on site and (if we thought anything at all) thought 'look, there's a telegraph pole'. Frances, on the other hand, thought 'that would be the perfect spot to mount a timelapse camera'. She sorted out the kit and found several brave/foolhardy souls to volunteer to shin up the pole every few weeks and change the camera's battery and memory card.

And this is what her vision is beginning to deliver. We now have a fantastic record of activity on site during the late summer and autumn of 2011. The first video shows some site clearance and the Common House beginning to rise out of the ground. The second one shows early construction of Terrace A.

But what's also lovely is the view of the trees and the river, with leaves falling and shadows lengthening as the season changes. Next time the light falls that way and the trees look like that, we'll be living there looking at them.





jo

www.lancastercohousing.org.uk

Timelapse photography project is go!

If you are in the Aberdeen Road area of Lancaster you may have noticed a house bristling with cameras – I have bought two timelapse cameras to document the demolition and building phases of our cohousing project and am doing some trials working out the maths of how often the cards will have to be changed etc. They are both very easy to use.

1. A ProjectCam, to go on the top of the telegraph pole in a fixed position, and stay there for the duration of the build. It automatically takes a still picture at fixed intervals during the working day which are later edited together to get a sped-up movie of the build. Check out details of the camera  and an example of a time lapse video of a building project made using one of these cameras.


2. Bushnell Trophy Cam (as used in Land of the Tigers. If a tiger walks by at Forge Bank we should get a picture of it.) This smaller camera works on a motion sensor and/or time lapse. It can be positioned in various places (trees, buildings etc) according to what's likely to be happening. It has an infra-red sensor so will start taking pictures when someone's doing something on site, but could also be used to get shots of foxes, otters etc and can take pictures
in the dark.

These cameras are more suitable for our project than a much more expensive kit I was considering (Canon SLR etc)- they won't get quite such professional results but I'm a lot happier with this cheaper option, not least because the expensive kit might have got nicked or damaged.

ProjectCam is due to be installed on the telegraph pole next week, in time for demolition starting...

Field testing

Left are two photos taken 30 seconds apart. In the first, there's a person quite far down the road on the right hand side, who I think is the same person in the second photo further down the street on the left side. Ideally I'd have liked five-second intervals, as would have been possible with the expensive kit I didn't buy, as it would have given a smoother motion with people's movements – clearly they can jump quite far in 30 seconds from one frame to the next! But 30 second intervals should be fine for buildings going up or coming down.

The other thing is that although the resolution is good on ProjectCam, the lens is nothing like as good as the Canon SLR would have been. However it's pretty good for what we want and a fraction of the cost.

The test also showed that the highest resolution photos have a file size of just under 1 MB. So with a 16 GB memory card, that's about 16,000 photos. If Project Cam is set up to take photos for the working day 8.00 am to 5pm every 30 seconds, that's 1080 photos per day, so it looks like someone will have to climb the telegraph pole and change the card about once a fortnight.

Luckily, Geof and Cliodhna are back in the cohousing project: Geof's telegraph pole climbing skills are second to none!

Frances

www.lancastercohousing.org.uk