Another challenge

I find time-lapse photographs fascinating - you know, the ones that show clouds scudding across the sky or a bud turning into a flower.  I even include those comparison pictures, the pairs that show the same view 100 or so years apart.  Well, there is a time lapse in those too.  Of course, in order to take a real time-lapse picture, like the bud opening, one needs to set the camera on a tripod and leave it in position, pressing the shutter release button at predetermined intervals.  I have, from time to time, toyed with the idea of producing a time-lapse picture - or though they are really videos - but have decided that the whole enterprise would be too complicated for me to set up.  I was musing on the subject the other day when I recalled an episode of Midsomer Murders in which the owner of a camera shop set up his camera and tripod on the pavement outside his shop every day and took a picture of the High Street as the church clock chimed the hour - nine, I seem to remember.  That gave me an idea.

When I get out of bed in the morning and throw back the curtains, I always look across the valley to the Downs and I watch the changing of the seasons.  I notice the sky: sometimes a leaden grey with 10/10 cloud, sometimes a duck-egg blue with no clouds at all, sometimes a deeper blue with fluffy, white clouds scattered across, sometimes hidden in mist or fog.  Why don't I, I thought, take a picture of that view every day and then use Photoshop to merge them into a video?  So that is my latest challenge.  But at what time of day should I take the photo?  My favourite for the light is as the sun is going down and the shadows are getting long, although the morning light can be great as well.  The problem with either morning or evening is that they are dark during the winter months.  Never mind, I will settle for somewhere between about 7.30 and 8.30 in the mornings, and if I have to migrate to a later hour in the winter, so be it.  If I'm still going in the winter, of course.   I have decided not to set the camera and tripod in place - the Old Bat would object or it would be knocked out of true - but I have taken a picture this morning and I will use that as a template to get future pictures to show the same area.  Once I have 10 or 15 or 20 I will see how the video comes out and, if it's OK, I'll carry on.

Just as a teaser, this is a picture I took one morning some months back.