Summer in the hudson valley… monkshood nursery

Here are a couple movies from working at Monkshood Nursery in the hudson valley, upstate ny.

June

July

Digital Farm Collective timelapse plant movies.

Found this project from artist Matthew Moore also making some timelapse plant movies and they are nice high quality films.

See them here: http://lifecycles.urbanplough.com/

And more info here: http://digitalfarmcollective.com

How to smooth timelapse movies by adding a Blur (or IIR) filter

Here is a movie processed by a IIR* filter. Essential each frame is blended with the previous frame.

This is the movie without filter:

The key line of the script is

composite -blend 15 new.jpg last.jpg -matte blend.jpg

So imagine a directory full of images. Image001.jpg to Image100.jpg

Each newly processed frame is a blend of the current frame with the previous frame. The parameter -blend 15 you can change from anything from -blend 01 to -blend 99. Play around a bit to understand it better.

The exact script I used is available here on github:

https://gist.github.com/1123061

It’s a bash script and it uses Imagemagick to do the image processing and FFMPEG to make the frames into a movie. Both Imagemagick and FFMPEG are free, open source programs that run on linux, windows and macosx. Plenty of other ways to do the same in other languages as well.

*(Infinite Impulse Response) a technical term for the engineers.

some june movies

Gaining ground lettuce

gaining ground greenhouse

First root farm near the peas. (this camera had an ant colony living in the base when i found it.)

some may movies

Gaining Ground

First Root Farm

First footage

After getting a few rides to the farms in the past weeks, I did my first bike ride today. it was fantastic. Mostly on the minuteman trail. About 1.5 hours from Cambridge to the farms.

Here’s some video from the farms.

A couple days in late April at First Root Farm.

There are currently 4 cameras set up. 2 at First Root Farm and 2 at Gaining Ground.  More footage coming soon.

And here is the first footage from Gaining Ground

Spending

this is a google spreadsheet we will use for tracking the spending on the project:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AhG7uR4_1QgedDdQb1Itb0syYzdkWGRfelRzWXZOcXc&output=html

Hello world! Timelapse farm is now funded.

For the backstory, consider checking out the kickstarter page.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1464315496/timelapse-farm-a-source-code-for-food