Continuing our “Covid-fun” to get people excited to travel again… well, even though China may NOT be the first on your list, here are some favorites from Shanghai!
If you’re a Passport Member then today you get to see not one, not two, not three but FOUR new quadcopter clips to inspire you that I just shot last week! Enjoy!
I’ve been working hard on an art commission here in New Zealand and having the most amazing time. I do a pretty good mix of ground-based and air-based photography. In between, I capture a bit of video stuff as well. Here are four quick videos I shot while there.
This looks cool.
They told me this is the biggest swimming pool in the Pacific Ocean and I have no reason not to believe them! It was absolutely immense! I had a great time swimming around in here and after a bit, I realized I didn’t even know where my stuff was! I was one of the only guests at the resort, so it should not have been that hard. But after swimming randomly around for a quarter of a mile, I didn’t have the faintest idea where my original chair was. I was too embarrassed to ask the staff where my stuff was, so I kept randomly swimming for another half hour until I espied my stash.
This is the most mathematically complex fractal I’ve been working on for a few months. If you’re a math nerd, it’s a variant on the Menger Sponge but I ended up messing with the coefficients so much that you will only occasionally see the source pattern.
Last month, I did another hardcore version of the Menger with the short “Devs Cube (based on the Alex Garland show)” – which is a bit dark and unsettling. Most of my other weird Machine Elf creations have been more calm and meditative. Choosing (or creating) music is very difficult. For this one, I decided to use one of my favorite Jon Hopkins tracks. It’s quite glitchy and full-on, but it works more than enough for me. This song (Everything Connected) is from his latest album.
We’re in the middle of generating a 360 version of this now… so if you have a VR set, it’s quite a ride. Enjoy…
When I was running around taking photos all over the island, they told me that this is where George Clooney stayed when he came. It’s a little hard to tell from this angle, but that pool is surrounded by this cool angled black basalt rock. It made the blue pop out even more.
If you’re a Passport member then today you’ll get that little bonus section where you see how I made the photo. I hope you enjoy it! It was a bit of a challenge…
I was a little worried during the edit of this one that it may not work out… but, I should have had more faith in myself, because it did in the end!
This is a photo made out of 9 different shots from the Mavic in a 3×3 grid. I love the way it turned out, but when you watch the making-of video below, then you’ll see it didn’t start out so perfect!
Here’s a new photo from the lake that I live near – Lake Wakatipu. This is a 9-photo panorama, stitched together in Lightroom. It was shot with a drone, and the final image is even higher rez than my best Sony camera. This exact spot is about halfway between Glenorchy and Queenstown. Pretty soon, we’re gonna get some snow… so I’ll head back out here with all the mountains are icy white.
Here is one of the amazing restaurants on the island. I think I ate here two times and each one was beyond spectacular. I’ve stayed in a lot of nice places (and I’m very grateful!), but this is probably the nicest I could have possibly imagined. It started as the private island for the gentleman that owns Red Bull and then he opened it up to the public.
Here’s a fun video that Stu edited together for me (thanks Stu!) of some of my recent quadcopter footage from around here. Enjoy!
What a cool spot, eh? This is one of the many places we take our photo tours when they come to New Zealand. Naturally, we cancelled the previous one because of the outbreak, which was kind of a bummer. We haven’t put a new one up yet because I have NO IDEA what the travel landscape looks like for the next year!
This is the closest that Hollywood has ever gotten to a DMT experience!
Early one morning, I woke up to get sunrise photos, but it turned out to be rather foggy. I decided to launch the quad to get photos of these three massive skyscrapers poking out of the cloud layer. I’m glad at the way it turned out, and I’m glad that I actually managed to land the drone through the haze!
In today’s Passport Sunday video, you’ll see some of the behind-the-scenes that went into the creation of a new work I did for a celebrity in Hollywood. It was a mammoth project that took about half a year. The final photo is a deconstructed panorama made out of 54 different photos. I hope you enjoy!
Here’s a special thing for Passport Sunday! I recently made a print for the actor Edward Norton. It was a custom print of Brooklyn that’s made out of 54 different photos I took from a drone. Here’s how it came about!
