After several hours of editing, these are my top 10 from 2008.

Sunrise, Torquay

Classic Portrait

Winter afternoon

Big Air, Falls Creek

Great Wall at Badaling

Maheno Wreck, Fraser Island

Creek

Grain

Milton, Brisbane

Red Car, Parkville

The candidates for my best pictures of 2008 are in this set; lots of depth from a photographic year.

I was lucky and in the right place at the right time with a camera.

Phil needed a portrait submitted to the Age for an article about Astronomy. While we were down at camp last week, I took the opportunity to make a few of him.

We tried out a few styles, and the photo that ran didn’t make it into my final selects. But then I wasn’t looking at the portrait purely for an editorial piece.

This is the photo used:

These are my two favorites from the shoot:

My challenge for 2009 is to become better at video production. So far I’ve spent a bunch of time learning to use Final Cut Pro, and reading up on editing techniques. However, the best way to learn is to try.

The video above is the result of a bit of an experiment.

For camp, we pitched 9 large A-Frame tents. This seemed a good event to try out some timelapse photography.

Three still cameras were used to capture the footage. My Ricoh GX100 was set to take the wide angle at a rate of two frames per minute. This was let run for the entire event. Phil took the close up video with a Canon G9. It captures time lapse video straight to Quicktime. I also used my DSLR to capture some stills.

The wide angle stills were processed in Lightroom to improve the colour, add a vignette and crop slightly. Exported to JPG and imported into a FCP with 2s per frame. The G9 footage was cut in over the top, along with the still frames.

To tie it together, transitions were added to each cut and motion added to the stills to create a sense of movement. The final image includes a text overlay created using Title 3D. Compressor then rendered the final output, that YouTube then crushes.