The rainy season is here! Albuquerque got about a third of its annual rainfall in one afternoon last week, a 130-year record for a single day. Every day the clouds build over the Jemez mountains and little, intense storms sweep along with the prevailing winds. I turned off the drip system over a month ago. It’s as green as it gets here. Lots of rabbits run around the yard.

I set up this sequence on midday, July 5, in the field across the street. It’s a time lapse of three hours at one frame every three seconds, rendered at 30 fps.

I like the Rokinon 14mm f/2.8 lens so much that I bought the 12mm f/2.8. Unlike the 14, the 12 is a fisheye. Since I had the lens pointed upward a bit, the horizon was a bowl-shaped curve. This wasn’t so bad, but I found that I could flatten it using the Photoshop CC Adaptive Wide Angle filter. So I set up an action in Photoshop to apply this filter, then Warp-transform the image to correct the corners and edges, followed by a Nik Detail Enhancer filter, and finally a Flatten Image and Save to TIFF. Applying this action to 3,600 images took about 75 hours of run-time on my 6 CPU Mac Pro.

Next, I opened the TIFFs in Lightroom and applied some small Curves adjustments and exported to TIFF for the initial rendering to 4k video. This took most of another day.

For the final render to 1080p, I used Final Cut Pro X. The reduction from 4k to 1080p lets me make some zooms in the video without apparent loss of sharpness.

Finally, I added the sound. “A Lincolnshire Posey” by Percy Grainger is probably my favorite short piece for concert band. I performed it more than half a century ago in the Clemson College Concert Band. This is the second movement, “Horkstow Grange”, performed by the Hal Leonard Concert Band.

The whole thing is Creative Commons - Attribution licensed