rainfall is very rare in the desert – that’s why many species of desert plant have developed special mechanisms that help them to increase the offspring’s chances of survival.

cheiridopsis sp. (family aizoaceae) is one of these species: it has dry woody fruits that protect the seeds during dry periods.
when it starts to rain – sometimes it takes years from one rainfall to another – time is of the essence: as soon as a drop of rain lands on the capsules, they absorb the water and hydrostatic pressure opens them.
within minutes, seeds are released onto humid ground and find a good base to germinate.

while in south africa last september, i tried it myself: a drop of water sufficed, and the seed capsule was completely open just 10 minutes later.

i’ve also created an animated time-lapse gif that shows the process: [more...]

anton decided to paint one of his bedroom walls, last month.
he had already moved all the furniture away when we had the idea of doing a time-lapse, so we put everything back to normal, set up the camera, and started from the beginning.

i think it was worth it:

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the video was created using my sony cybershot f828 and the jg-rc2 intervalometer.

sandra (purple) kicked our ass in no time, so we added a very short stop-motion sequence…

a 3-second-interval and 13 fps makes a speedup of about 40x (1 sec. in the video equals 40 seconds real-time).
i’m trying out flash video player 3.5 by jeroen wijering. please let me know if it doesn’t work for you.

in october 2004, i decided to let my hair grow for an entire year.
we all know the horrific outcome of this plan… :-)

i started documenting this “project” from the beginning – here’s a collage of self-portraits:

if you don’t know me – don’t worry, i’m back to normal now. ;-)

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while i was in spain, i decided to make a time-lapse video of the (apparent) movement of a star-constellation in the night sky.

unfortunately i couldn’t include the northern star this time, showing that all the stars seem to rotate around it. i think i’ll do this in another video sometime.
given the preconditions (location and timeframe), the big dipper (ursa major, grosser wagen) [wikipedia: de en] was the perfect motive.

the movement of the big dipper in the night sky

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i recently discovered youtube.com – a free internet service that allows easy sharing of videos.
what they do is convert uploaded videos into flash movies, which (almost?) everybody can watch.

have a look at this, for instance:

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i never got to post this *here*, but there it is now:

in the last few months, every now and then i found some time to play with my JG-RC2 and i’m really content.

the final firmware isn’t available yet, but i’m fine with the preliminary one, so far. (that’s how i got it in the first place – the final product version is not available, so i ordered the beta-version. but only the firmware will be different in the final version – and it’s upgradeable.)

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