Life Cycle Of Grass
Transformation is a life cycle – birth, life and then death. My initial idea is to document the growth of grass. Grass grows quickly – in a week it can grow to 2 inches from seed (depending on temperature, humidity, sunlight etc) So over a period of 5 days, I plan to take 1 photo every minute, for 12 hours to watch the grass germinate, grow and perhaps, if I don’t water it, to wither and die. The photos will then be collated into a time lapse video.
This is my set up, using natural light. With Aperature priority, f5.6, iso 100, jpeg (raw would take too long to use in a video).
As the project started I set up the camera to take one photo every minute for 10 hours a day. However, the grass did not germinate till day 3 so I change the setting to one photo every 2 minutes and took photos for 8 hours a day.
Once the grass germinated I changed the settings to one photo every 1 minute for 8 hours a day. This also prolonged the life of the battery and a fully charged battery would last the 8 hours shooting time.
Over 12 days I took c5000 photos and concluded only when the grass had died back (partly due to a deliberate lack of watering) after 12 days. I did not change the settings of the camera during this time and the change in sunlight was adapted by the camera as it was on Aperture Priority. As the sun moved in the evening it created an effective shadowing of the pictures.
The plan was then to convert the photos using Premier Pro software into a 3 minute film showing the life cycle of the grass. The 5000 photos converted to a 3 minute time lapse video.
Final Video – Transformation Project
The Bigger Picture 