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Chicken WebcamThe picture to the left is captured with a TreNDnet TV-IP201 with a Tamron 2.8mm - 12mm, f/1.4 CS-Mount Lens and uploaded to this server every half-hour. (Detailed picture of the lens here) This camera is West of Boulder, Colorado, USA, at our chiken house and cage. After sunset it is just static noise due to the automatic brightness control. Here is the view in a higher-quality camera. The image is linked to the ipernity page.
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Meadow WebcamThe picture to the left is captured with a TreNDnet TV-IP100 and uploaded to this server every half-hour. This camera is West of Boulder, Colorado, USA, pointed South-SouthEast. After sunset it is just static noise due to the automatic brightness control. Here is the view in a higher-quality camera. The image is linked to the ipernity page.
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I set up a couple of webcams, one in my office, and one on a pole near my house. My initial idea was to take the picture from noon every day for a year and make that in to a very long-term time-lapse movie. To do that, I save the picture from both webcams every 5 min, and then upload it to my websites every half-hour, using a little cron script written in ruby.
I chose 22:00 UTC (4PM during "daylight saving[sic] time") for my latest video which is August 2007 through June 2009 from the meadow camera. It took 217 days to make that video, and the output is 14 seconds at 15 fps. I think the effect is pretty cool, especially with the tiny tree "dancing" in the snow. Here is December 2007 to June 2009 at 15:00UTC through the Fourmile webcam.
Reflections on this project: the amount of light from day to day is very variable, with clouds and other atmospheric disturbances meaning that there is a "flicker" to the movie. But, without clouds there wouldn't be that cool snow to fall and melt. Spring might be really cool with the grass going green and then brown in summer. The 6mm f/1.8(fixed) lens isn't very good at this, I would like to stop down to about f/4 or so to prevent those blown highlights during the day. My other camera that is outside has problems with freezing and changing the focus/focal length of the lens due to the thermal expansion of the housings. The Tamron 2.8-12 f/1.4 zoom that I originally had was horrible at this because it is a varifocal design and was susceptible to thermal expansion, but the Pentax 12mm f/1.2 is a bit better.
Because of this project I know quite a bit about wifi and making it stable, as trying to send data over a failing wifi link does bad things. Directional antennas, power adjustments, using Tomato on my routers, signal losses over cables, and ping all are useful in keeping the packets going smoothly.
My email address is phot (at) ogra (dot) ph.
