# This flower opens in six seconds. On the table it took three hours.

- Series: [How Cameras](https://miu.fm/howcameras.md)
- Published: 2026-10-30
- Page: https://miu.fm/howcameras/this-flower-opens-in-six-seconds-on-the-table-it-took-three

## Story

This flower opens in six seconds. On the table it took three hours. What did the camera do?

It waited: one frame a minute. Played back at 30 frames a second, twelve hours last 24 seconds, 1,800 times faster. In 1910, F. Percy Smith did it with flowers in The Birth of a Flower, which the BFI calls a watershed moment for what we now know as time-lapse. He called it time magnification. He had been a clerk at the Board of Education, and he shot it in colour, in Kinemacolor, for Charles Urban. His petals opened on screen as if in real time.

The whole trick is the gap between frames: a frame a second and nothing moves, a frame a minute and it opens, a frame every ten minutes and it bursts open while the sun runs across the floor. Anyone who walks past becomes a ghost, too quick for one frame to catch.

The loft, the flower and the camera are our own models, built and lit in code.

A day in 24 seconds. What would you speed up?

Sources: BFI, "10 great natural history films"; F. Percy Smith, The Birth of a Flower (1910).
Music: our own, played on GarageBand instruments. Sounds: made by us.

## Watch

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DfIx-_NlFtr/

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