Time-lapse videos of a flowering Lophophora jourdaniana

I’ve previously made an attempt at a stop-motion video showing the thigmotropic behavior of Lophophora stamens. It so happened that the Lophophora williamsii var. jourdaniana plant flowered again during my summer vacation, leaving me plenty of time to experiment with time-lapse videos.

The first video shows the Lophophora williamsii var. jourdaniana flower unfold (I’m not exactly an early bird so I missed the first part of the unfolding ;-)



The above video covers a time span of approximately 90 minutes, i.e. playback is sped up by a factor of 150. This is my first attempt at a time-lapse “flower movie”, as can be seen by the quality of the film. The first 11 seconds were shot while the camera was in auto-focus mode, resulting in a “wobbly” feel. I then disabled auto-focus (and lost a couple of frames in the process, which can be seen as a “jump” 11 seconds into the video) and later had to re-focus (28 seconds into the video), so it's not perfect, but not bad either. The frames were shot with the sun as the only source of light.

Next, I wanted to make a better (i.e. more frames per second) version of the thigmotropic stamens video but ended up with a version looking a lot like the original one.



The playback of the above video is sped up by a factor of 12. Unfortunately I stopped taking pictures just as the stamens started to revert to their original position. In an attempt to achieve more frames per second I played around with my cameras continuous shooting mode. Suddenly the flower was visited by an industrious bee beautifully illustrating the purpose of the touch sensitive stamens ;-)



I guess the last 2 clips would be more illustrative if they had been filmed with a regular video camera instead of an SLR, but they’ll have to do for now. Unfortunately my camera ran out of power effectively putting an end to the filming of this particular flower.

Finally I have to mention the Hydrocactus – cactus video page as the main inspiration for these experiments and the best source of cactus videos I’m aware of.