Watch the Christmas tree setup movie from... 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007

Date: December 2-3, 2006

Movie plays at 8fps; pictures were taken every 10-15 seconds.

Soundtrack: an excerpt from Boele Gerke's "Shortened Days".

I was probably in a much better mood during last year's tree setup, so no trees with arms this time.

Shortly after I shot last year's movie and started encoding everything I could get my hands on with H.264, I thought I might try doing this year's movie with a still camera. I hope this movie doesn't bring your computer to its knees—it still plays perfectly in full screen mode on my (t)rusty 867MHz TiBook.

Camera used: Canon PowerShot A520. No flash, auto-focus. The hideously-designed Canon computer utilities allow for remote shooting time-lapse shots. I hoped to have a lot more frames to work with, but this model's USB 1.0 connection meant I could only take shots every 15 seconds or so.

I inadvertently left auto-focus off in the remote shooting control window, so this year's movie wins the Irony Award: much higher-resolution movie but with lots of out-of-focus frames.