On Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:02:37 EDT, Galen Hekhuis wrote:

http://s181.photobucket.com/albums/x278/ghekhuis/
-snip-
I have a time
lapse camera that takes pictures once every ten seconds. You can see
it in the "before" photo where it sits on a pole overlooking the pond.
It will run for about two days on batteries, then I review what it has
seen in the form of "movies," so I can watch the entire day in a
matter of minutes. Most of the time nothing happens, but I have
caught pictures of ducks, turtles and other critters in the pond even
with the duckweed.

That's a cool way to watch critters. Does your camera spit video out,
or do you need to convert jpg's to avi? What resolution do you get
from the individual frames? I've gotten nice video at 1200x1600, but
then the software seems to choke- and I can't take as many pictures-
yesterday I took 4700 on a 4gb card- 5 seconds apart, about 8am-8pm.
The individual photos look ok at 4x6- and they made a 2 minute video
at 35 frames per second.

For Christmas my son gave me Canon point & shoot camera- and a pointer
to http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK .

Time lapse is one of the things this free, open source, software makes
[almost] any Canon point and shoot do. It is a cool way to see
your pond-life in a few minutes.

My little 8x12 pond had its first lily bloom last week. So I set up
the camera to watch it open and close. Took a picture every 10
seconds, all day long.

My plan was to just get the flower, but when I went to set the camera
up there was a frog on a nearby piece of driftwood, so I zoomed out a
bit and included the driftwood in the frame. All told I framed about
12x18". from 8am-8pm I captured a sparrow, 4 frogs, 2 damselflies,
several water skippers, a damselfly larva, a couple water beetles, an
apple snail, an inch worm & a bunch of pond snails. Oh-- and a white
water lily opening and closing.

When I point the camera at the land right beside
the pond I've seen deer (natch), 3 hens and their 12 wild turkey
chicks, raccoons, a wild boar (actually probably a feral pig, but it
sounds more exciting if you say "wild boar," though), rabbits, and
various other critters that don't hang around long enough for me to
identify.

Cool bunch of critters. Does your camera have infra-red or are
these all daylight?

I won't go looking for alligators, but a few years ago one
moved into the back pond. It isn't there any more but I don't exactly
know what to do if one moves in again. They are rather well protected
by law here in Florida.

Glad I'm in NY. No need for gators in my pond. A boar would be
cool, though. I've had turkeys at my feeders next to the pond- but
none since the pond has been there.

Jim