True Nature Stories: Sunday Ramble

Sunday Morning Fog

Some days go so perfectly you feel in tune with the universe. Other days you figure it must be time for a tune-up.

I always get a tune-up when I visit Mt. Tam, even when some things go perfectly south, like yesterday when I locked my ebike to a tree and realized I didn’t have the key to unlock my battery so I could swap in the fresh one. With less than two bars left on the first battery, there was no way I was going to make it home. I’d probably go to zero on the hill out of Sausalito, or maybe in the cold, howling wind and fog part-way across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Luckily I had my phone, and once I was back in cellphone range I was able to call my wife to come get me. We still had some grocery shopping to do, so we met up at The Good Earth down in Tam Junction, which we’ve been curious to check out anyway, and where I was able to get some sprouted wheat bagels and tempeh, neither of which our local Andronico’s carries.

When I got home and downloaded the three trail cams’ memory cards, I knew perfection had been lost again when I saw that one of them had more than 4,000 images on it. This was from the third cam that I set up last week, and I figured I must have missed seeing some errant blade of grass that caused a lot of wind-triggers. I downloaded the images figuring it would still be worth it to weed out hundreds or thousands of “empty” frames in order to get the one classic bobcat shot.

But when I pulled the images into Lightroom I was struck by the fact that almost every frame looked the same, and that nothing in the images indicated what could have caused the false triggers. Also, every one of the 4,000-plus images was shot on the same day I set out the cam, and only covered a couple hours of that day before it shut down.

After mulling over this strange turn of events for some time, it finally dawned on me that I had set that camera to shoot a time lapse while we were camping at Sonora Pass recently.

This morning I drove back up to Mt. Tam, arriving just as the ranger opened the gate at 6:58 a.m., and the trail cam was indeed still set to shoot a frame every few seconds. Now I know, if you set time lapse on the trail cam, you have to unset it to make it stop. I swapped out the drained batteries, reformatted the memory card, set the correct shooting mode, and drove back home so I could get to the farmer’s market before the strawberries sold out.

By the way, I like the idea of using a trail cam to shoot a long time lapse. For one thing, it runs silently since there is no mirror-slap like there is on my Nikon D800E. The unfortunate thing is, the trail camera doesn’t compile all the images into a single time lapse video file like the Nikon does. I had to pull the thousands of images into Adobe Premiere Elements to create the time lapse, and despite following somewhat complicated directions I didn’t get the smooth-running playback that I’d hoped for. I was surprised a dedicated video program couldn’t make it easy to create a decent time lapse, especially since the Nikon does it in-camera.