Backyard Timelapse Snapshot

Everyday just after 6 O’clock in the evening I shot a panorama of my garden from my backyard patio. I started shooting the series on April 9th and I will continue to shoot and add to the series until snow falls in October.

Everyday I went outside to the backyard to take the pictures. I could physically see a difference in the flowers. I could see the buds coming and flowers blooming. There was always something different. Seeing two panoramas from consecutive days displayed one after the next should reveal many changes.

This is my image I shot on June 25th. I will put all images on my website. As technologies improve I hope to be able to show the entire series in a linear spherical movie that can be panned as time progresses. As of this writing the technology for viewing this kind of media is not mature enough.

I am not much of a gardener. I did not know what I wanted for a garden when it first was created in 2002. My family took control of all aspects of first setting it up. I have later learned that I would like a very low maintenance garden. I have made a few changes to this extent but not many. It takes time to save time. Some of the bushes have grown too big. I hate cutting them back, but I will need to cut them back and maybe also move them closer to the fence so they don’t hide other plants.

A regular supply of constant rain this season resulted in everything growing very well including the lawn, which needed mowed about every 4 to 5 days. I managed to find enough time to sneak in between rainfalls to keep it cut. I did a little cleaning up and maintenance just before the WWPano event. I planted some more grape vines to climb up onto the arbor. And I put up a Canadian flag to celebrate Canada day for July 1st. The week before I had a wheel barrel full of compost to distribute. I dug up one of the beds to take most of it and distributed the bulbs that were getting crowed there. The compost container was no longer sitting on the ground. Its contents were coming out all round the bottom of the container. It needed to be emptied and sat back down on the ground.

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USA-Canada / Canada-Ontario

Lat: 45° 18' 25" N
Long: 76° 55' 9" W

Elevation: 101m

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Nikon D70s camera with Nikkor 10.5mm Fisheye lens
Homemade panhead, Manfrotto tripod
6 shots around, 1 up, 3 down
PTGui, PhotoShop CS2, Pano2QTVR

Everyday, at about the same time (just after 6PM) I shot a series of photographs to create a panorama. I shot these from the exact same location on the backyard deck. I placed three screws in the boards to mark the locations of the tripod legs. On April 9th, I took the first panorama of the series. I will continue to shoot and add to the series until snow falls in October.

In the current 3 months I have missed only about 4 days. This usually was because of way too much rain at the time. I shot many days with light rain. I just put a piece of plastic over the camera to protect it and took the zenith (up shot) last, to minimize the amount of water on the lens. In 2003, I created a few panoramas to show off different stages of construction and improvements I was making to our back yard. In 2004, I decided it would make a neat series shot from the same location. I tried to shoot a pan every Saturday. The scene changed too much from one week to the next. I knew I would have to take many more images to make it smooth transition through the season. I never did publish them on my web site and my hard disk crashed and I lost most of the panoramas I shot that year. There are a few from 2003 still on my web site. I was doing lots of construction that year and the back yard went through some major changes. This year I only have some minor improvements I want to make. The garden itself has matured quite nicely. So instead of showing construction and improvements it now shows the garden itself as it grows through the season. If for nothing else, I will be able to use this to see where I need to fill in some color holes (places and times where I don't have flowers blooming).