My grandson, who lives in a wooded area, and I planted some seeds for a spruce tree. He wants to watch it grow. The package says the seeds will germinate in about 6 weeks and then grow 1-2 feet each year. I set up my old Nikon S8200 camera on a tripod so I could take a photo each day around 1 pm. Then I did a little research on time lapse photography. If I did the math right, I'll need about 1800 photos for a 1 minute video. If that is to cover about 90 days, I'd need to take 20 photos each day. Yikes! That camera does not have any time lapse features.

I posted a question on the Talk Photography forum. One member recommended LRTimeLapse as the best time lapse software available. So I am here to see how it works.

I also got a couple of other suggestions:

1. It was suggested that the tree project is fairly advanced and I should first practice on something simpler, like cloud movement or traffic, that can be completed in a day or so.

2. We planted the tree seeds in a bucket. It's sitting by a window that gets full sun. But we will eventually have to plant it outside. One person suggested I get a trail camera. I had never heard of them, but I find that there are quite a few models available. Some are fairly reasonable ($50-$200). Most have some time lapse features, some have motion detectors, and some even have wifi support.

I would appreciate any comments or suggestions on what hardware to get and how to use it and how to integrate the photos with this software. It there a particular trail camera that works well with this software?

It seems that there is more than one version of this software. Which one should I get? My plan is to get the free version first to try it out. If that works for us, I'd upgrade to a paid version.

Thanks

Hi Cynthia, thanks for your interest.
Indeed this is a quite advance project. If you want to achieve good results, you'd need to put a lot of effort into it.
The main problem with such long term timelapses is that the light changes between every shot if you work with ambient light. You will have cloudy days, sunny days, rainy days etc. and when playing that back it won't really look good.
That's why professional timelapses of plants growing are always shot in the studio with artificial light - this gives much more pleasant results.

One approach, if you do it outside is also used by contruction timelapsers: the just just way more images as they need (every 5-15 minutes) and later filter out the ones that don't work. LRTimelapse Pro offers a filter where you can filter by luminosity, hue and contrast to get a residual set of images which is as homogeneous as possible. There is a tutorial on https://lrtimelapse.com/tutorial/advanced where I show this process.

But of course here also, you'd need long time power for the camera, shelter from rain and moist, a way to empty the cards without shaking the camera etc. etc.

I don't want to discourage you, but basically there is not a real simple way to get a good result without putting a lot of effort into this. I though I'd better tell you that before you start investing in hardware and stuff and would be still disappointed by the results.

Of course LRTimelapse can help you with assembling the images and filtering, but that's only the tip of the iceberg, I guess.

My recommendation would also be to start with "normal" timelapse. My EBook should be a very good helper to get into timelapse itself: https://lrtimelapse.com/buy/ebook/

This post was last modified: 2021-12-28, 18:38 by Cynthia Moore. Edit Reason: Typo

Hi & thanks for the reply.

I worked at a company that built a new lab. One of the company engineers installed a camera on a nearby hill to generate a time lapse video of the building being built. I believe the construction took about 18 months. The resulting video did have a lot of light changes, but that just made it more realistic. I don't know anything about how they did it.

The descriptions of the trial cameras indicate that they can be programmed to take photos at various intervals. At least one has wifi support. That ought to allow me to extract the photos without touching the camera.

Is there a trail camera that you would recommend?

Personally I have no experience with those, sorry. But maybe someone else will jump in here...