Passiflora caerulea

Passiflora caerulea

Passiflora caerulea is one of the best known passionflowers in Germany. If a store carries passionflowers, then P. caerulea is the first among them.

It is one of the most cold tolerant passionflowers, tolerating down to -15°C and below. The only problem that may occur in my region, is rotting of the roots due to too much rain.
This winter is the first for one of them planted out in my backyard, but I have a backup in my conservatory among all the other passionflowers which can't stand frost.

Although it is winter here and all my passionflowers are in my conservatory for overwintering, this one bloomed even in winter. Just in time to play a bit for this WWP event.

The whole object movie is made of 360 single photos, which cover the upper half sphere in 10° steps. The shots were taken with an old object rig from Kaidan, which I found on ebay months ago. I had to modify it a bit, because it was made for a much lighter cam.
It took me 35 minutes to take the photos themselves, btw.

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Europe / Germany

Lat: 50° 0' 20.29" N
Long: 8° 34' 11.99" E

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: Unknown / Undeclared.

Nikon Coolpix 5000 with all parameters set to manual (shutter speed, aperture, whitebalance, distance); Kaidan Magellan QC-1 (object rig), modified for the Coolpix 5000. PaintShopPro for cutting the flower free, QuicktimePro and QTVR Edit Object for making the object movie.

Object Movies

I consider this my "Best of 2005", because object movies are the subject where I try to push my limits further at the moment.

I have occasionally done now and then object movies for years now, but until now I was not really satisfied with the results. The first one was made 1996 on a turntable for a TV. I could take three rows before my selfmade object rig collapsed.

With the cam that I have now, it is the first time that I can set all parameters manually: aperture, shutterspeed, whitebalance and distance. Without this option, it's really difficult to make objects because either some photos of the set are not sharp, darker/brighter than the others or have a different color. The eye is really sensitive to such changes while paning and rotating an object.

Some months ago, I found an old used object rig on ebay and couldn't resit to get it. I guess it's the first model Kaidan ever released for object movies: Kaidan Magellan QC-1. It is the one that old manuals show for making objects.

It was designed for a really small cam, so I had to modify it a bit for making photos with my Coolpix 5000. It got a bigger counter balance and has still some issues to be fixed, but having click stops for the angular steps of the two rotations helps a lot while taking hundreds of photos.

Passionflowers usually open their flowers only for one day, but in summer there are many flowers. I was lucky that I had a day off when this one opened. Due to the long time that it takes to take all the photos, I had to put the flower in a small water reservoir while taking the photos.

It took me 45 minutes to take 468 photos of the passionflower: 36 photos per row, 13 rows, 10° steps for each rotation. The object movie which I submitted shows 10 rows of that -- the upper half sphere. The more that is shown of the object, the more photos it takes, and the bigger the object movie becomes. To get it less jumpy, smaller angular steps are needed, which also results in more photos for the object, so it grows again. That's sadly a problem of the whole thing.

The compromise I made for the WWP entry, was to toss the rows below the equator and I used a high compression for the photos. I am sticking to 10° steps. I have an additional object movie with 15° steps on Kugelblick of Passiflora 'Byron Beauty', but that's a bit too jumpy.