Ian's Blog – April 2015 Archive (4)

Having builders round with the tendency to turn off the electric several times a day has slowed me down a bit - I can't shoot timelapse so I've been working away at the 250gb of images so far adding zooms and pans to the footage. Catching spore formation still eludes me but I've hit the science journals and found out that niacin encourages spore formation so I might be spending the weekend painting rotting bits of wood with it. 

I've had a short film maker approach me over the…

One aspect of the physarum life cycle is still evading the cameras - Spore formation. Normally I don't have a problem making spores but putting the organism in a natural(ish) setting and pointing multiple cameras at it seems to make it misbehave. I might have to rethink the setup to improve my chances - hard drives are getting very full now as the number of stills hits nearly 200gb. 

This means I have actually taken more photos of physarum than any other subject and I'm not…

Two cameras, and four days of shooting at 20 second intervals leads to an awful lot disc space taken up. So far I've just done a rough render - take the whole damned lot and turn it into one movie file. Now I can see the massive deficiency in using the study rather than the workshop for shooting - every time I tread on a floorboard the camera moves. 

Easy to fix by tracking a couple of points in the images but tedious and slow. 

The huge advantage of using something like an SLR…

I've been shooting time lapses all week - all in Petri dishes and all of them have messed up due to condensation so I'm trying something different.

Somewhere in this box, amongst the moss I meant to add and the slugs, spiders and mites that just came along for the ride is a load of . 

The base is a paint tray  full of potting compost packed down hard two large colonies of  physarum on paper covered with  moss, rotting wood and grass seedlings. I'm hoping after a day in the dark…