OK, boys and girls, time to take a break from bickering over warming trends and the greenhouse effect. 🙂

Let’s take in some of Nature’s beauty. My new hobby is time lapse photography, and here are 4 very short video segments I’ve put together for your enjoyment (sorry, no music to go with them).

For those not familiar with the technique, you can plug a controller into a digital SLR camera on a tripod and take many photos in succession at whatever time interval and exposure settings you want, do some (optional) “high dynamic range” (HDR) enhancement in post-processing, and then render the resulting photos as a video file, which I do in Photoshop.

I’m currently partial to the night sky as a subject, since a good DSLR camera with a fast lens can see more stars and satellites passing over than the unaided eye.

The first video I took last night from a very dark location near Hytop, Alabama (be sure to (1) click on the HD icon to toggle on the high def version, and (2) Full Screen icon next to the “HD” marker after you start the video):

http://vimeo.com/59066740

The second video I did a few days ago at Little River Falls, near Ft. Payne, Alabama:

http://vimeo.com/59076557

The third video is from my backyard at night, of stars, the moon, Jupiter, and clouds moving past the 1,000 ft tall TV tower we live next to:

http://vimeo.com/59092011

The final video was made during our wedding anniversary visit to the Grand Canyon in late November, 2012, and shows moonrise over the Canyon:

The cameras and lenses used for each, as well as the settings, are provided on my Vimeo.com page.