Lights, camera, slooow action!

Here is my 1st attempt at creating a movie by taking sets of sequential pictures and then combining them in Windows Movie Maker. It shows a Tridopsis coming out of its shell. It is one of those species that has been on this blog before several times (for example, here and here) and still not been identified.

Now allow me to be my own critic. The 2 main problems were: (1) the lights were not bright enough; (2) I didn't get close enough to the snail. Afterwards in Photoshop, I had to increase the brightness of all the shots and also crop them, which ended up taking quite a bit of time. The other problem is that because the camera was hand-held and because I was changing its position with respect to the snail between sets of sequential shots, the resulting film is choppy. I think cropping also contributed to choppiness. Nevertheless considering that I wasn't using a video camera, it's not too bad, is it? The best part I like is where the snail flips its shell over at the end.

All the pictures were taken with an Olympus E-500 in the sequential mode with the picture quality set at SQ to decrease the size of the individual pictures. The total number of pictures combined was 109.

The next one will be better.