A Short Time-Lapse That Captures a Year of Grapevine Growth at a Sonoma County, California Vineyard

A Year in the Vineyard” is a short time-lapse film by photographer M. J. Wickham that captures one year of grapevine growth at the Ferrari-Carano Vineyard in Sonoma County, California. After trying a number of different cameras to capture the changing light with each season, Wickham decided to go with a GoPro Hero 3 fitted with a solar panel that had to be mounted to a car battery.

The solar kit was not up to the task and the shop manager figured we should rig a car battery to power the go pro and set up a solar panel to have it run continuously. The solar panel he used wasn’t big enough, so in the end we would head up to the site every 10 days to change the memory card (64 gigabyte) and bring a freshly charged car battery to swap out. Mind you this took about 6 weeks to accomplish and numerous visits to the site. …We let the camera run at 1 frame per minute for 12 months. The number of images was staggering. 1440 images per day, a grand total of 525,600. I knew that when the time came to sort through all of the images for the final time-lapse that I would be logging many many hours. …I settled on 15 images per day and came up with a general plan of having springtime be morning like, summer midday and the fall would end up in the evening. Mother nature is uncontrollable so I had to revise my plan some but in the end I feel that I captured the variety of weather and the progression of the growing season.

via PetaPixel

Lori Dorn
Lori Dorn

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry, playing guitar, taking photos and mixing craft cocktails.