Night Blooming Cactus

Hello to all. I know it's been a while. I bought a house that was built in 1947 and it is requiring a lot of TLC on my part so videos will probably still continue to be few and far between, Sorry.

This video is actually a fluke. My back yard is a complete jungle of plants of which I know nothing about. This cactus is 8 feet tall and it began to bloom the other day. I was going out of town for a few days and decided to put the camera in the kitchen window, aim a flood light at it and see what happened. Well, as you can see the flowers only open at night. Also, they each only open once. After that they turn brown and fall off.

In response to a question, what I did was take a picture every 10 minutes for 3 days. The first scene in the video is one night and roughly what the original pictures looked like. I used a medium resolution so I could take about 500 pictures but still be able to enlarge them later with reasonable clarity. I'm very limited in time right now so I cheated by taking the original pictures, made them larger on the screen with a picture viewing program and then made a 320 X 240 closeup screen capture jpeg of each flower blooming sequence. Since each flower only bloomed one night it only amounted to about 70 new pictures each. The flower in the second scene IS the flower in the lower left side of the first scene. I also redid one night of the original pictures (first scene) with the screen capture program to make all of the pictures the same size (320 X 240) and then made the video with the new pictures, not the originals.
The screen capture program I use is for the Mac and called Capture Me (chimoosoft.com). Once I have made all of the edited pictures, I create the image sequence with Quicktime pro (the $30 version) because it allows me to quickly try many different frame rates to find the one I like best. In this case I would have rather used a rate of 10 fps put it was just too fast so I settled on 6 fps. Finally, I use iMovie to add text and music.

Music is used with permission:
Song Title: Divertissement (composer Leo Delibes)
Music: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)".

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• time
• lapse
• timelapse
• cactus
• bloom
• night

[iamzehwalrus]

This is incredible. :)

[MentalLapse]

Thanks Jhealyn :)

[19animerocker94]

beautiful!!!! i luv how the instramental music fit in perfectlly. its cute ^^

[MentalLapse]

A little flower ballet is always good. Thanks :)

[stev0071]

Don't fall asleep next to the pod! Nature sure is a strange creature. Very cool!

[MentalLapse]

Haha, beware of the pod :)

[Sun0072341]

سبحان الله

[ksbkitty123]

ohhh I like this a lott!!

[MentalLapse]

Thanks Milly. Each flower only lasts one day but I just took a quick glance at the cactus and it has well over 50 buds in one stage of blooming or another. It's actually been quite entertaining because it's been blooming for a month and most nights will have 2 or 3 flowers open. My only complaint is that it happens in the middle of the night, lol :)

[toucanorange]

It seems a shame that the flowers only open once then drop off. Great video!