I’ve recently come back after an extended Labour weekend trip gathering new content. I teamed up with with friend and fellow time-lapse photographer, Bevan Percival from Primal Earth Images. It was the first time we’ve teamed up in the South Island to get to some areas we both wanted to get go. Our approach was to base ourselves at Cromwell (my home) and travel to locations where the weather was good, occasionally camping out overnight while shooting some astro scenes. In all reality, the weather was a bit challenging given that it’s spring when the weather can go either way. We faced some gale force winds on the hill tops in Central Otago range where our cameras shook, in addition to rain that resulted in a scurried pack up. Access to many of our scenes were gained by four wheel drive. Here’s a few set up pictures:
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Now that I have a load of new time-lapse content to process, it will take me a while to render them out. My PC is 6 years old now and it sometime takes a huge amount of time to render out a raw or lossless time-lapse with over 600 frames. For instance, one scene has over 110 hours to render. What I’ve now done is had a new PC build which will speed up my workflow. This also includes a 27″ 4K monitor. The detail and speed is going to be phenomenally better, although how I’ll pay for it will be a small issue.
I’m really pleased that Macpac have asked me to supply some of my content for their recent “Think 5 to 9” campaign. See the clip below and look out for the sunset time-lapse about two-thirds in. It sounds promising in that they’ll want to use more, or maybe consider commissioned work.
https://www.facebook.com/macpac/videos/557716091438528/
Unlike general photography competitions, time-lapse competitions are rare. New Zealand Geographic stopped providing this category because of a lack of quality entries I was told. There are a few other international competitions but it seems hard to get a look in when competing against other mainstream contenders.
Lately, I’ve enjoyed listening to photography podcasts on my drive to and from work. I spend close to an hour-and-a-half driving each day and radio reception is not always good. I download photography podcasts on my phone and play them back. It makes the journey go much more quickly and it’s always interesting to hear the views of others.