Time Lapse - Adobe After Effects

While reading a magazine i saw something about Adobe After Effects. It's kind of like Photoshop for videos.

It was super complicated at first.
Then little by little i learned how to use it. I also watched several How-To video's on YouTube.

I still only know a tiny bit but it has great potential. It has the ability to create videos with lightsaber fights and other amazing effects.

So here's what i created, no special effects, just simple camera movements.

• I first created a simple intro.

• Then i added the music.

• Then i added some of the time lapse videos i made.

• Then was able to create motion using a camera tool and changing the zoom and position.

It takes a while, you need a fast computer and it's a bit of a pain, but i plan on using it a lot more.

This is what it looked like when i was all done. The list of videos are on the left and at the bottom are all the effects and timelines of when they happen.

Travel Tips

Here's things i learned from the trip to Italy

• Best Place (outside) - Trevi Fountain

• Best Place (inside) - St. Peters Basilica

• Best View - all of Florence from Michaelangelo's Hill

• Best Square - St. Peter's Square at The Vatican

• Best Cheap Food - Panini's at many corner stores. €3 for a great grilled sandwich. As you can see Karrie and Jeff liked them as well, they are great food to eat and walk.

• Best Restaurant Food - Spaghetti. €8 from most everywhere

• Best Fancy Food - Ciampini Restaurant in Rome. Near the Spanish Steps

• Best Place for a Drink - all of the public drinking fountains scattered across Rome

• Best Bus (for us) - #62 - all around downtown Rome. Also the #175 which took us to the Termini train station and back.

• Most Fun - feeding pigeons in St. Mark's Square in Venice

• Biggest Surprise - A 3-way tie between the cooking class in Florence, the Catacombs in Rome and the Accademia Gallery to see the Statue of David in Florence.

Things i'm glad i brought:

• 2 camera's - especially in Venice when i took hundreds of pictures and my first camera battery died, luckily i had the backup.

• Backpack's - i had the backpack for carrying all the food, water, maps... I also packed the cloth backpack for other people to carry things they bought. Karrie also had her leather bag that held the important items.

• Money belt - i wasn't so sure when Karrie bought this but it was great. I kept the money and passports in there and i didn't have to worry about any pick-pockets. I really liked it.

• Power converters/adapters - Karrie and i each had our own 220v to 110v power converters and plug adapters. We would have had to buy them there because the plugs in the hotel were the weird Italian kind. The converters weren't perfect though. Lots of things like hair dryers and curling irons ran like they were on Low. But lots of things like my phone and camera chargers had writing on the back that said "working range of 220 to 110 voltages" so all i needed was the plug adapter, not the converter.

• Although most people spoke English, i'm glad we learned the first 4 or 5 chapters of "learn to speak Italian." It was just a few hours of a book-on-tape but it really helped knowing the basics. It was pretty easy and we weren't completely clueless when we got there.

Things i didn't like:

• Having to pay €3 for bottled water at every meal. They said they weren't allowed to serve tap water.

• Having to pay for bread at every meal. You didn't know that until after you received your bill.

• Having to pay to sit outside. The restaurants charged an additional "outdoor seating" fee.

• Tipping was also weird, no restaurants wanted tips. They all said that the tip was factored into the price of the food.

Things i wish i had brought:

• A watch - at home i don't wear a watch because i have my cell phone. But in Italy i either left my phone at the hotel or it was turned off, so the whole time i had no idea what time it was.

• Gel insoles - we did a lot of walking and my feet got sore after day 6 or 7.

• Better Maps - our maps were ok but it would have been nice to have one really good map with greater detail and bus routes in the 3 cities, Rome, Florence and Venice.

• It probably would have been better for us to buy the 7 day bus pass for €16 instead of having to buy individual tickets every time we decided to ride. It was a pain having to find a euro for every person, every time we rode.

Garden - 2011

This year was the same story as the last two years. There's not enough sun in my back yard due to all the trees. I really only get about 4 hours of direct sunlight. Besides that, some of the plants did ok. I really only care about the corn, but with the lack of sunlight they are never really going to grow well in my yard.

Here's what i grew:

• peppers - red, green, orange, jalapeno
• corn
• sunflowers
• tomatoes - cherry, giant
• gourds
• carrots
• onions
• pumpkins

After the first month.

The sunflowers did the best this year. They grew so high and big that some broke in half on windy days.



The peppers grew pretty well.
They must not need as much sunlight as other plants. The jalapeno's did the best of all the peppers.
The carrots came out ok. Some of them split open and others had weird mutant shapes.
Notice the weird looking carrot.


The gourds on the fence did great too.

Final Lotus of the Year

Well as of right now the lotus plants are in the basement for the winter.

I didn't want the roots to freeze so i brought them inside. When it warms up enough in the spring i'll take them back out.
Here's what i have previously written about trying to grow them:
Sprouting Lotus Seeds
Lotus Update
Lotus in the Sun

Anyway going back a few months ... I was down near the Ohio border again for work and saw the lotus fields. Here they are in August, in a channel off of Lake Erie.
A view of all the lotus beds.
There were millions of them.
The view from the causeway.
A view of one of the rivers near a power plant to the north, flowing into Lake Erie.
Here's what the area looks like from above. The water is Lake Erie, the highway is I-75.
Back at my house the hot 90 degree summer days really made them grow big. The sun, heat and humidity outside caused them to take off. Here was one of my first aerial leaves before it opened up.
There were around four aerial leaves per pot.
The lotus effect on the leaf.

Some close-ups.

Back down near Monroe, Michigan i found a place where you can see them up close. It's visible from I-75 but you have to loop around to get there.

The leaves there grew much bigger then the ones in my backyard.
The seed pods which grew from the center of the flower.
By this time a lot of the seed pods had turned brown.
A couple of them broke off their stalks.
But there was a ton of them. If you figure that each seed pod has around 20 seeds on average, you can see how many seeds are here.

Although like i said earlier, seeds aren't the main way that these grow. They spread from the tubers in the mud, like how grass in your yard spreads.
Here they are in September. The leaves are turning brown and starting to go dormant.
The ones in Monroe had already turned brown.
This is right before i cut the leaves off, drained the water and moved them to the basement.
I'm expecting great things next spring. Hopefully all the energy is stored up in the tubers and will cause the plant to shoot up bigger then they grew from a seed this year.