Lately, I’ve been midwifing monarch eggs and watching over them as caterpillars. I’ve lost a few to outdoor predators, though.
Nevertheless, I’ve been using my phone to shoot potatovideo of the eggs hatching; the caterpillars eating their milkweed feast; and their moulting (the current batch I brought indoors until they reach being a chrysalis for 48 hours, before I plan to move them back outside).
The first couple of videos, time exposures, were set up with a tiny tripod and phone clamp, with the phone plugged into my nearby A1138 for bus power (as time exposure, plus on-board light, would have wiped out the phone’s battery in less than 90 minutes). Then, I shot a series, by hand (i.e., no gimbals, no steadycam, etc.), using a phone-clip mounted to a tiny tripod.
Then, on my A1278 running High Sierra, I used Premiere Pro and After Effects CS6 to prep basic (i.e., light editing) clips in 1080p for future reference, and occasionally tidying up things using QuickTime 7.
Below, from early this morning, features a just-found egg (unplanned, as I wasn’t looking for it when I went out to harvest fresh milkweed leaves last evening for the three other caterpillars I’ve been looking after); then, to the oldest of the three caterpillars (born seven days ago, in the morning); followed by the second-oldest (the same one as in the first clip, born four hours after the first); and then the youngest (born eight hours after the second).
In this clip, the youngest was caught in real time during an instar moult (which was the portion I sped up to 4x, from a two-minute-long shimmying to one lasting about thirty seconds).
If you’re not into nature stuff and find bugs icky, don’t watch the clip. But for the rest of y’all, enjoy the marvel of nature’s show — all done on “obsolete” hardware.
🐛
