Making our Meadow Blog

Spring

The meadow beneath the cherry looked fantastic this morning with the lush greenery interspersed with forget me nots, tulips, fritillaries, the rampant wild stachys, and a self sown cowslip. In the dry meadow the cowslips seem to be doing less well, with numbers down on last year, but there are lots of other wild flowers in the bud. The pyramidal orchid is looking good (as are Dactylorhiza fuchsii in the pot) and in the wet meadow, the cuckoo flower is out and there is a single White Fritillary.

A solution

Might be to give up on the D70 and just use the d200 with a simple Intervalometer for £20 (the built in one isn't versatile or long lasting). It would have been nicer to use the D70 but the lack of a shutter release port is such a problem with it finding a way round is more expensive than just accepting defeat and moving on.

Next issue: power!

Time lapse camera update

My attempt to make a time lapse system has foundered again it seems. I had bought a custom made intervalometer and had planned to use it with my D70 to make a system I could run off a 12 v battery. However it has proven to be a very flaky set up. Unless the LED is in exactly the right position it tends to not fire and after a relatively short amount of time the camera switches back to it's default setting rather than the IR remote setting. It would be so much easier if this could be set as the default but Nikon never thought of this as usual. I'm beginning to suspect that the intervalometer is simply not adaptable enough anyway. I might have another go using the option in the Capture software running off my main PC rather than the dodgy netbook I was using which just crashes all the time. Buying a new laptop for this is not really justifiable at the moment. But I can eliminate all the other issues it might still be a viable option: a time lapse system which isn't 100% reliable is next to useless.