Watching Bread Go Mouldy

Mould, Time Lapse, Science
Share Tweet This! Email

Time Lapse of Bread Going Mouldy

I showed my son a piece of bread with mould on it the other day, and he thought it was the coolest thing ever. He is only 2, so everything is pretty cool at the moment. It inspired me to make a timelapse of a piece of bread growing mould that he might think was even cooler!

So I set up the timelapse zone, sealed it to keep in humidity, put on the macro lens and here is what we got. A time-lapse of bread going mouldy, top view up nice and close to see all the action.

Our Video of Bread Growing Mould: Macro

This is the end result. We used a macro lens in top view position.


Making the Mouldy Bread Time Lapse

We love making time-lapse science videos, and this was no exception. But this mouldy bread time-lapse was a little harder to make than the usual time-lapses we do.

Mould needs humidity to grow, so you can't just place it on the table and take photos because the bread would dry out. We cut the top off a 2l plastic bottle and placed a trimmed piece of bread at the bottom. We then set up the tripod and pointed the camera straight down into the bottle. All that was left was to make a seal around the lens and the top of the bottle. We did this with a plastic sandwich bag and 2 rubber bands. Once rubber band on the bottle and one on the lens. This created an airtight enclosure perfect for growing mould.

We used a Canon DSLR Camera with a Canon 100mm Macro Lens. Because the time-lapse was over many days, we powered the camera with a wall plug instead of a battery. And, because there was going to be around 5000 photos, we connected the camera directly to a computer. This saved us replacing memory cards, as the images saved directly on our hard drive.

From there it was just a matter of creating a video from the photos.