I want to be taking more pictures, so I got the camera out so that it’s accessible instead of staying packed inside the travel case in my closet. I spent some time taking snapshots of Heather and Corinne today; mostly Corinne, Heather wasn’t interested.
Nothing special, but it’s a slice of life around here. And Corinne needed some more pictures anyway. So we can pretend these are her 10-months-old pictures (just a few days late).
Heather turned four this year. But not without some Heather-style anxiety. In the days leading up to her birthday she would occasionally have little meltdowns about not wanting to get older. She liked being three and didn’t want to get bigger or do different things. We assured her that it was not an instantaneous event–She would still get to go to pre-school, dance class, and gymnastics. That seemed to help her calm down.
She had a party on Saturday with friends from church. They painted pictures, ran around the house like loons, and ate cupcakes. It was a blast.
Over the weekend Heather started asking if we could play “miniature ball” by which she meant miniature golf. So we did that Monday evening. She’s never played before and we’re not sure where she even got the idea from. She was really excited though. When I got home from work she just about tackled me.
She started out enthused and interested:
But by the 18th hole she just wanted to be done:
I had a great game. I averaged 2.66 strokes per hole on 18 holes and my worst hole was only 4 strokes! On the way to the parking lot I asked Heather how it was. I told her, “I had a great game; probably my greatest game!” She responded, “I had a boring game; probably the boringest game.” I think she had fun overall, but she was definitely ready to be be done. She burned through most of her energy being excited all day.
On her birthday I made a treasure hunt for her to find her presents. Mom would do this for us every so often growing up and I thought Heather would really enjoy it. She thought it was amazing.
I compiled a video of the footage Jess took of the treasure hunt. It’s at the end of the post if you’re interested. I was able to trim it down to 7.5 minutes, which I realize is still quite some time to watch a video, but it’s still pretty great.
We did the treasure hunt and opened presents during lunch so Heather would have the afternoon to play with gifts. Jess convinced me that this was a better plan than waiting until having cake after dinner then opening presents and immediately trying to send Heather to bed.
We had dinner at the Ale House (or, as Heather prefers to call it, the Ollie House). It’s Heather’s favorite restaurant. They apparently have the best mini corn dogs, fruit, and milk dinner in town. Then it was back home for cake, colored blue per Heather’s request.
Overall I think she had a great day.
And now the Treasure Hunt video:
And a direct link if you want/need to download it to view it: Heather’s Treasure Hunt 2015 (right-click, save link as…).
Wanted some more practice with my lighting equipment and Corinne turning 7 months old seemed like a good excuse.
This one is our favorite of the bunch because of Corinne’s face. Sadly it was one of the first I took and it’s overexposed on the side of her face.
And some more:
Heather was super excited for her first day of preschool at Cottage Preschool. It was a little overwhelming at first, a lot of people moving around and unfamiliar terrain, but it settled down. She did end the day slightly disappointed that they didn’t learn Spanish, but it doesn’t seem to have been a devastating let down.
Also, I had a really hard time getting a decent picture of her this morning. Our yard does not lend itself to pictures at that time of day. Either too much sun, or a sunny background (like this one), or speckled sunlight, or the sun hitting directly on the sensor preventing the off-camera flash from firing. I was getting a little frustrated, but I think I unlocked a “Dad Achievement.” Heather was getting tired of taking pictures too and I got my first, “[sigh] Daaaad. Are we done yet?”
Heather has been using her Nabi Jr. tablet for awhile now. It has a camera on it that can spin from front-facing to back-facing. I configured it to automatically sync the pictures to the computer.
With the pictures all in place I created a time-lapse of Heather’s past year. If you don’t care about the nerdy details of how I made it, jump to the bottom to watch the video.
It started with the 925 pictures she took over the last year. I ran them through ImageMagick to pad them to a consistent size:
$ cd /home/heather/Pictures
$ mkdir ~/Desktop/tmp
$ find "./2014/12 December 2014" "./2015" -name "*.jpg" -exec mogrify -gravity center -background black -extent 1600x1600 -path ~/Desktop/tmp {} \;
Then I, again, used ImageMagick to interpolate 3 transition frames between each picture so it’s less jumpy (still pretty jumpy though):
$ cd ~/Desktop/tmp $ mkdir morphs $ convert *.jpg -morph 3 ./morphs/out-%04d.jpg
Okay, that’s a little bit of a lie. ImageMagick’s convert tool currently (version 6.x) reads in all input before doing anything. When it tries to load in the 925 images it uses up all the memory in my computer and then dies. So I had to break it up into batches (IM 7 supposedly fixes this problem). I used batches of 100 which still used about 7 GB of RAM:
$ ls *.jpg | head -n 100 | tail -n 100 | convert @- -morph 3 morphs/a-%04d.jpg $ ls *.jpg | head -n 200 | tail -n 101 | convert @- -morph 3 morphs/b-%04d.jpg $ ls *.jpg | head -n 300 | tail -n 101 | convert @- -morph 3 morphs/c-%04d.jpg # .... all the way through head -n 900 ..... $ ls *.jpg | tail -n 26 | convert @- -morph 3 morphs/j-%04d.jpg
Doing it in batches results in a duplicate frame between each batch, so at this point we have to delete b-0000.jpg, c-0000.jpg, d-0000.jpg, etc. (but keep a-0000.jpg).
Now we’re ready to run them through mencoder to produce our video:
$ cd morphs $ mencoder mf://\*.jpg -mf w=1600:h=1600:fps=16:type=jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -of lavf -lavfopts format=mp4 -oac copy -o ~/Desktop/output.mp4
I tried doing this with ffmpeg/avconv, but it kept cropping my images and I couldn’t make it work. I also spent hours trying to get all this to work without using intermediate files, but ultimately failed. This process is a little more arduous (I might get around to writing it all into a script at some point) but it does work.
Here’s is the view from Heather’s world from December 2014 through September 2015 (there’s no audio):
Or right-click and “save as…” to download it here: Heather’s View – Dec 2014 – Sep 2015 (small)
If you watch closely you’ll see Christmas, Jess being very pregnant, Corinne appears, Grandma visits, Kyle’s birthday, and a lot of wandering around the house.
It’s not super exciting, but I think it’s kind of an interesting insight into Heather’s world.