Planet Earth was a pretty mind-blowing nature documentary overall, but I particularly enjoyed the time-lapse footage of the bizarre plants and fungi on the jungle floors. Of course they had the benefit of professional HD cameras and talented cinematographers, but thanks to Hammacher Schlemmer, anyone can capture a time-lapse video of their own garden growing with this dedicated video camera.

The Brinno comes attached to a stake, making it easy to mount anywhere in your garden, and the lens can focus as close as 20-inches away from your subject, or it can capture a 54-inch wide field of view to get everything in frame. It snaps a photo at one of six preset time intervals, anywhere from every 5 seconds to every 24 hours, and the stills are compiled into a single 1280×1024 AVI file for watching on your computer. The camera’s housing is weather-resistant, which means you can set it up and forget about it, and it has a built-in light sensor that turns the camera off at night to extend the battery life. The 2GB USB flash drive it uses can store around 18,000 photos, and on a single set of 4 x AA batteries the camera will run for about 4 months when shooting once every hour.

At $159.95 it’s roughly the same price as a basic Canon P&S, but odds are you’re not going to want to leave one of those out in your garden for months at a time.

[ Timelapse Garden Video Camera ]

By David Ponce

We don’t spend all our time at the Convention Center, or inside hotels. No no… we also spend an ungodly amount of time getting to and from these places. Here’s what that looks like.