During fall , the leaves of many of ourdeciduous treeschange color before fall off and dying . Sad , good ? It calculate on how you seem at it .
Owen Reiser — a very patient math and biological science student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville — spent more than a calendar month take the color - convert summons to create an challenging , two - minute clock time - lapse TV have faithful - ups of leave of absence transmute from yellow and green to red and chocolate-brown .
“ I was taking a field biota class and we were learning about deciduous trees , ” ReisertoldSmithsonian . “ I ’ve been getting into wildlife photography and time - lapsing for a while , and I could n’t find a time - lapse of leaves changing color , so I just went for it . ”
Deciduous : watch foliage interchange color before your eyesfromOwen ReiseronVimeo .
It took Reiser six weeks — and many sleepless night — to compile the footage . He snapped more than 6000 close - up photos of leaves , include images from 10 dissimilar Midwestern deciduous trees , such as sassafras and sugar maple . He require a picture of each foliage once every 30 to 60 second for three solar day using a camera , a LED light , and a battery that appropriate his television camera to run constantly . “ It ’s [ essentially ] a cardboard box and a bunch of duct tape , but it gets the job done , ” he order .
you could see the green and yellow leaves speedily fill with reds and Brown ; new color dramatically take over , and pigments break down . It see like “ dyestuff spread through fabric , ” according to Smithsonian .
But what appears when the leaves alter color is n’t so simple . “ People reason that the red people of color is [ also ] an unmasking from the crack-up of chlorophyll , and that ’s simply wrong , ” David Lee , professor emeritus in biologic sciences at Florida International University , told Smithsonian . “ The red coloring material is really made when the chlorophyl is beginning to break down — there ’s a synthesis of those pigments , so it ’s quite a different thing . ”
Either way , after watching the television , you ’ll never look at fall foliage the same way again .
[ h / tSmithsonian ]
