Tag Archives: Hibiscus

Hibiscus Flower

Hibiscus Blooming Timelapse Video

In late October I used a laptop running Linux and fswebcam ran via a looping script to capture pictures of a Hibiscus plant that was blooming. I took one frame every 10 minutes and then used mencoder to produce an AVI video at 12fps. The webcam takes pictures at 640×320 which is a good size for online videos.

The Hibiscus is quite striking as it blooms. Not only does the flower spiral out it opens and spiral back on it self as it closes up again. But the whole thing is constantly vibrating and moving during the blooming process. This movement is something that would not have been noticed without using time lapse photography. It took four takes to get a decent video. On takes 1 to 3, I wound up re-positioning the camera away from the flower as it expanded in size when it opened.

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