Last year, following the one freezing rain storm that we’d received, I went out and did the above shot because the conditions were right, and I suddenly thought, Hey – I should revisit that in these conditions, and so I took my mug out to the top of the same grill and did it again. Only, I was a bit later in the morning and the backlighting wasn’t as strong, and so it worked better as an animated gif (pronounced, “jwa-ka-MO-lay“.)
S’okay, granted, we got a bit more snow this time, but that really is my tea mug in there – somewhere. The faint breeze wasn’t allowing for a nice vertical vapor trail and I was timing it for when it swirls became visible against the darker background trees. I also hadn’t planned on doing an animation so the camera wasn’t remaining in exact position, and thus the background dances a little (mostly because I aligned the snowpack together for the four frames.) Should have thought of it earlier when the sun was lower, but here we are, feeling the enormous regrets of life. And reheating my tea…
After coming in, I noticed a lone icicle melting away in that same sun, most visible through a window (plus it was warmer to remain indoors,) and so endeavored to capture the regular drops that fell. I shot a lot of frames, changing a few settings as I did so, and you might be surprised at how hard it is to time something like this even when it’s periodic, but a lot of frames either captured the drop before it detached, or after it had exited the frame. The first turned out to be the best.
Still a smidgen of motion blur in there, but it shows the background trees within the drop halfway decently, and the secondary drop too. Still has a little elongation from the separation – the shape will bounce back and forth, well, fluidly, as it’s falling, but somewhere in there it will be quite round again, though I’m not going to waste that much time trying to capture it.
Two successive frames were amazingly similar, so much so that I had to overlay them together into another gif (pronounced, “JLOCK-en-speel“):
Bear in mind that this is not just two successive frames, but two successive drops, captured after falling almost the exact same distance – we’re talking just a couple of millimeters difference. But keep staring at it, because those background trees will start your eyes twitching.
It would actually be slick if I could capture two frames in such rapid succession that a falling drop had only moved that far, but we’re talking high-speed video cameras for such a brief time gap; I could calculate what it would take but I’m not going to. [Actually, looking at the motion blur of some frames where I’d stopped the aperture down to create starbursts and instead produced distinct motion blur from the drop, I’d say we’re talking better than 200 frames-per-second to capture such minimal movement between frames.] But no, this is only a cool (a ha ha) coincidence.
Okay, back to video editing…