I have been experimenting with time lapse photography for a while and decided to build a motorised slider for motion time lapse shots. The idea is that while you are doing a time lapse sequence of photos you are also slowly pulling the camera along a rail so that when the images are played back you have a time lapse view from a moving position. I bought and intervalometer for my SLR that just triggers the camera to shoot a set intervals and a Opteka camera slider rail. The camera needs to be pulled at a slow rate along the rail perhaps 1 or 2 RPM so I used two Tamiya Planetary Gearbox kits together to step this 9000 rpm motor down to 1 rpm with a huge amount of torque – powered by 2 AA batteries. The whole unit sits in a wooden frame I made to keep the tension between parts. The Camera is fixed to the slider with a ball head mount and the motor slowly pulls the camera down the slider with fishing line wound to a spool on the end of the drive shaft. Camera is used in full manual mode – with white balance NOT set to auto. When the collection of shots are played back as video at a normal frame rate you get the benefits of SLR lenses – particularly depth of field as video. I am using Apple Motion 5 to construct the videos at full 1080p.

Here is my first videos from the rig in the garden at home – day 01

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I was all set to photograph the Lunar Eclipse on Saturday night, this shot was from 11.20pm as I was testing my set-up. Not long after the clouds rolled in obscured the view of the Eclipse. That is as close as I can get with my 300mm zoom on the SLR. I’ll have to wait another 4 years to try again.

This link will take you to a time-lapse video of CIT Momentum 2011 – The final exhibition of students of CIT’s Centre for Creative Industries.

CIT Momentum 2011 – Exhibition Night – Time-Lapse

This link will take you to a time-lapse video of my students setting up for CIT Momentum 2011 – Their final exhibition.

CIT Momentum 2011 – Design Bump In – Time-Lapse 

This is a VR panorama of Booroomba Rocks in Namadgi National Park in the ACT. This is a popular rock climbing area about 40km from Canberra. Suzie and I went out for a drive and ended up walking up the mountain – probably a reckless decision as she is very pregnant but we eventually made it to the top. There is an amazing view of the the Brindabella ranges with Canberra City off in the Distance. There is still evidence of the 2003 fires where the area was badly burnt but the area is starting to recover. The panorama is 36 shots stitched together making a seamless 260 degree view.

This image is an interactive panorama – click and drag inside the image to view the scene

Another rainy spring day in Canberra, I took these experimental shots quite early in the morning as the water beading on the long grass (which always needs mowing) looked really interesting and was catching the first light of the day. I used a Canon G9 in macro mode mounted on a gorilla-pod with  2 second timer to avoid any shake. The shots are as close in the cameras lens would allow and I think a bit better than my SLR zoom macro could get. The images were tweaked in Adobe Lightroom and a colour filter added to alter the green values.

These images are close-ups of some Australian birds taken with a 20omm zoom macro. I love how this lens reveals the detailed feather patterns and interesting eyes on the animals.

This is a very short animation using 3d depth and camera panning in Apple Motion. I noticed this effect being used in some documentaries and advertising and created this animation as a demo for our students learning motion graphic design. The photo is of a Kookaburra I shot with a zoom lens some time ago, this has be bird has been carefully isolated and prepared with a new background on seperate layers for animation in motion. The layers are separated by z depth with the Kookaburah being closer to the camera in 3D space. Some subtile camera behaviours produce and effect than cannot be achieved via a single static image and is often used to get maximum milage from a photograph.

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These images are from a tutorial about hand rendered typography and how to digitise those graphics and use them in our designs. The first image is a rough draft developing the basic shape of the letterforms, I then map that out with more care on some grid paper, measure areas and develop the strong letterforms. Once complete I stick the artwork to my desk, stick some quality tracing parer over that and trace the design with care to produce a very clean master. This trace is then scanned, adjusted and finally traced using the auto trace feature in Illustrator. This process produces a very clean results providing your tracing work is thorough. Once the lettering is converted to  vectors they can be treated in many different ways.

These 2 images are from two of Hamilton Islands lookout points. They are interactive panoramic images with a 170 degree view of rotation. The first is from “One Tree Hill” and looks out over Whitsunday Island. The second is from The lookout over the Reef View Hotel looking out to Catseye bay – a little grey that day.

This image is a 360 degree interactive panorama – click and drag inside the image to view the scene





This image is 360 degree interactive panorama – click and drag inside the image to view the scene