Yesterday at sunrise a huge concrete pumping truck showed up at my shop construction site. It was about 6:30 in the morning. I had set up my time-lapse camera on a tripod overlooking the site, and the shutter was activated every five seconds.
This is the construction site of my new shop. The form had been built in recent days, and it was ready for cement. The huge pumping machine on the left made short work of the contents of eight cement mixer trucks.
I put my battery base on the camera (a Canon R5 Mark II) because it holds two batteries. I have never used the R5 for time-lapse before, so I was unsure how many photos it would take before the batteries died.
Eight workers showed up at about the same time. They were fitting their cement boots and taping the boot-tops around their blue jeans to keep the material out.
The pump truck moved once to position itself better for the “pour.”
I asked the team leader when we could expect the first cement mixer truck to arrive. Seven! he said, and then added, “concrete waits for no man!”
At 6:58 a.m. the first of eight mixer trucks rolled up the road to the shop, made a three-point turn, and backed up to the pump. Four minutes later, that mixer was dispensing cement into the hopper of the pump, and the eight workers started their dance with the outflow of that machine – a long rubber hose that dispenses wet cement at an amazing rate.
This is the crane part of the concrete pumping machine. It can reach about 100 feet from the source of the material. I spent the morning in awe of the weight of that material, and the ability of the machine to do its job so easily.
What transpired next was a fleet of trucks arriving on ten minute intervals, sometimes one, sometimes two at a time, unloading into the pumper, and dispensing their supply of cement.
After seven truckloads, and 66.5 cubic yards of material had been poured into the form, they ran out. I was told that this was normal. The contractor calculated for, and ordered seven truckloads, then had the men on the site do another calculation for how much more they needed to finish.
They did the math to determine that one more truckload – 9.5 yards – was needed. The cement company is reasonably close, only about 8 miles from the site. They mix on-demand, so they mixed up another nine yards and dispatched the last truck to the site. It took about 30 minutes. While waiting, the concrete workers were using wooden and metal screeds to smooth the material, and smaller hand trowels to smooth around pipes and bolts. Others were loosening vertical wooden braces and removing them. I asked the pump operator if he ever gets nervous. He said he does, but this was a cool day, and the risk to the already-poured cement was small.
As the men approached the final corner of the form, the supply ran low and the pump started spitting rather than pouring its contents into the pad. I asked the contractor what happens if we run just a little short. He told me that they order as much as needed and the company dispatches another truck to deliver it. But, surprisingly, the men didn’t run out. In fact, there were about two cubic feet of unused cement left over when they reached the corner of the form. I was amazed.
These are the talented workers who converted 76 cubic yards of cement into a perfectly level concrete pad for my new building. They exhibited extraordinary professionalism and real teamwork in doing the job (and they shared their lunch with me!).
For the time-lapse, I used my Canon, and a radio-controlled remote trigger that can be operated from a distance. I set that trigger to take an infinite number of photos at 5-second intervals, and I walked away. I had about 512 GB of storage available, so there was no risk of filling the cards.
I have considerable experience with time-lapse movies, but I had never made one that started in darkness and continued into right sunlight (except my 365-day time-study project at Cal Poly, but that’s another story). I set the camera to shoot and store in JPEG large format (I usually shoot Raw, but that would be ridiculous for this application). I cleared both memory cards. Then I set the ISO to “auto” and the exposure to “aperture priority” and I let it run.
In the first shots, which began just before sunrise, the exposures were 3 seconds, the ISO at 12500, and the aperture at the fixed f5.6. As the sun came up, the exposures changed automatically to lower ISO, and faster shutter speeds.
After about four hours, the camera batteries died, and the camera stopped taking photos. That was OK, because the work was mostly complete by then, and the only thing still happening in the scene was the hand troweling. I took 2,828 total photos.
Last night I copied all those images to my Mac Studio, renamed them in Adobe Bridge, and then created a movie in DaVinci Resolve. The only settings change I had to make was the minimum frame value for imported still photos. I changed that to 1, then restarted Resolve and loaded all 2,828 images into a timeline to make the movie. The result is here.
I added titles and then exported the movie to .mov format and uploaded it to YouTube.
I hope you enjoy the show!
To watch the time-lapse video, click here
