Red Steps
I was in Times Square a few weeks ago and shot a timelapse from the Red Steps near the TKTS booth. I had tried to do this a couple of times before but the steps were always closed for some reason. Tourists are back in NYC and it was very busy.
Shot using a Nikon Z 6ii with Nikkor 14-30 f/4 AF lens. A two second interval was used. NYC was experiencing some haziness that day because of the wild fires in Canada. Haziness that day was not as bad as some days in the previous weeks.
Three Months In 33 Seconds
There is a new HS being built near my home in Wooside. I wanted to do a timelapse of the construction but didn’t want to tie up one of my Nikons cameras for an extended time. I decided to improvise. My solution was to use a Raspberry Pi 3 with a RP camera module and a third party telephoto lens. Notice the trees in the foreground. There are no leaves on them at the start of the clip and then the trees bud and bloom.
I used various scripts and the ffmpeg video utility to create MP4 video clips of construction activity everyday. I them merged them into one long clip and edited in Final Cut Pro X. The Raspberry camera quality is not that great but I enjoyed the experiment. Hope you enjoy it too.
ubassman plays bass
I wasn’t able to perform for most of 2022 due to my health issues. But, I have started to play out again over recent months. I’ve posted photos from two recent gigs. One with the Accidental Gypsies. And one with The Flynns. It was pouring rain on both days. The gig with the Gypsies was outside and was especially damp. The Flynns gig was inside but I got soaked on the way to the job.
Looking forward to many more gigs as the warm weather moves in. And, hopefully they will all be much drier.
30 Days In 30 Seconds
New York City’s SCA recently started building a new high school near me so I decided to attempt a long term (construction) timelapse. It wasn’t practical for me to dedicate a DSLR for this so I chose to use a Raspberry Pi with an attached camera module. After some experimentation I came up with the following configuration.
- Raspberry Pi 3b running bullseye
- Raspberry Pi v2 camera module with custom lens
- motion capture software
- fswebcam software
- ffmpeg software
- Various scripts and crontab
The motion software runs continuously on the Raspberry Pi and allows me to view the cam via web browser to check operation. It also captures an image every (60) seconds and creates a a (24) hour timelapse every day. These timelapses were not used for this experiment. The fswebcam software was set to capture an image every (3) seconds during work hours using cron. Once a day the captured images were converted to a video clip using ffmpeg. Then (30) of the resulting clips were then assembled into a (30) second video. The Pi and its camera the v2 module are not capable of capturing high quality images or video. However, I think the results were pretty good. Raspberry has a new HQ camera module which I may look into. I hope you enjoy my experiment.
The Bass Is Back
As mentioned in previous posts, health issues kept me home bound for much of 2022. My health is much better now and this past Friday I played my first gig since April of 2022. I played with The Flynns at Donovan’s Pub. This was their regular Donovan’s First Friday engagement. The Flynns have been playing first friday’s for about the last ten years.
For my first gig in nine months I played my new Kala ubass. This was a “blem” that I picked up direct from Kala at a good discount. The bass looked perfect. It took me a while to find the blemish. I swapped out the regular poly strings for some flatwounds (Gallistrings), replaced the nut with one designed for flat wounds and finally cut done the bridge saddle to get the action right where I wanted it. It plays like a dream now and sounds great. Looking forward to playing lots more gigs with this beauty.
Friends and family came down to welcome me back and cheer me on.
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