The Garda Station in Salthill is very close to the Prom but is hidden behind the building adjacent to the Waterfront Hotel. For a brief period in 2008, the Gardaí in the station had a view of the sea – the station is the yellow building visible over the hoarding in the top picture in the sequence above. I don’t have a picture of the row of buildings before the old one was knocked, and I can’t remember what was there before.

As you can see in the sequence above, in the time it took to build the apartments, the arcade business (on the right) changed the paintwork on their facade, and on the left, Coco opened and the wine shop beside it closed. Today, it looks like all of the apartments have been bought and are lived in (at least at the weekend). I went for a look around them when they went on sale  in 2010 and while they are well enough appointed inside, the key feature is the amazing view of Galway Bay afforded by the ceiling to floor glass frontage.

Since the last picture was taken, it looks like all of the apartments are occupied – however, the commercial property on the ground floor is unoccupied [there was a convenience store there for a short while].

I set up two cameras on tripods  – one with a wide view and one with a more close-up view of the same scene. Each camera was fitted with a remote shutter device. One camera took a picture every 8 seconds, the other every 20 seconds. Once the remote shutters are activated, I don’t need to do anything except wait.¹

Now, hanging around on Salthill Prom isn’t exactly hardship, though the breeze was a bit on the nippy side. I had loaded up my iPod with a load of podcasts, so thanks to Terry Gross, Blake Esken, Rico Gagliano & Brendan Newnam, and a host of others, the morning passed quickly (I rarely get time to read newspapers anymore – except occasionally online – but I am totally sold on podcasts). In addition, I have yet to set up a tripod anywhere on the Promenade without someone coming over for a chat, so I had some company on and off over the morning (and if you should see me on the Prom – or anywhere else – standing beside a bunch of cameras clicking away to themselves, be sure to come over and say hello).

The absolutely essential equipment for doing timelapses, apart from the cameras and tripods, are plenty of memory cards and batteries.  The timelapses in the videos below consisted of 791 and 1191 photos respectively, and took up about 20Gb of storage. Between the constant clicking  and the cold, the cameras went through the first set of batteries  in 2 hours.

That’s where another vital accessory came in very handy. I had left the spare cards and batteries back in the house, so, after a quick phone call, my missus agreed to get up and bring them to me. Of course, since I taken the car, she had to walk the 3 kilometres to actually deliver them to me [and walk another 3kms back home again afterwards]. And while she was with me , she fetched  a cappuccino and breakfast bap from Coco’s coffee shop nearby [ that's the other really great thing about doing a timelapse on the Prom - you're always close to a great cup of coffee]. B & H don’t supply wives, but if they did, I’d order a Langan.

Here are the timelapses – the first shows the Prom in a wide view (the camera was located at the walkway in front of the Waterfront Hotel) and the Bailey Point complex is visible at the left of the picture, and Seapoint can also be seen. Click here to view. The second video is a close-up of a huge rock [also pictured above] visible at low tide (also visible in the wide view) – click here to view.

¹The timelapse is created by uploading all of the pictures onto a computer and using Quicktime software  to create a video. Watch them in HD mode if possible.

Here is a timelapse video taken of the tide rising onto the pier for the last hour leading up to high tide this evening (high tide was 18:48 this evening). It was created by taking a picture every 5 seconds and then creating a movie from the images using Quicktime 7 (using over 700 images in total) – the ‘frame rate’ was 24 images per second of video.

Two years ago, during the summer, I went off to India for a week. I left instructions that my plants were to be watered regularly – I had herbs growing inside and lots of flowers growing in the back garden. As it turned out, the watering wasn’t much of an issue – it had been monsoon season in Galway the entire week I was gone. As soon as I arrived home, I did a little tour of all the pots to see how the plants were progressing. I had planted rosemary seeds several months earlier, and they had finally begun to sprout just before I left. I went over to where there were a cluster of pots, and looked for the rosemary plant , but all I could see was a pot of soil with nothing growing in it. Actually, there was one smudge of green. When I looked more closely, I could see that the green smudge was a fat little caterpillar, sleeping off a feed of freshly consumed rosemary. My first instinct was to squish the little fecker but then I thought that I might as well get some benefit from the situation. My basil plants had survived and when I left  a basil leaf in the pot beside the caterpillar, he promptly scoffed it. I put in another one – same result. I couldn’t get over  how fast he got through it.

Originally, I set up my Canon G9 compact camera which has a timelapse video setting on it. Alas, it tended to shut down after about 30 minutes of recording. So I set up a Canon 5D with a timelapse shutter-release and fed it another leaf. It took the caterpillar a couple of hours to get through it , and it occasionally takes a breather to help digestion, but there isn’t much of the leaf left at the end.

See the caterpillar timelapse video here.