Another year, another PanoTools Meeting. I've been involved in their organisation since the first one in Berlin back in 2003, but this was the first time I was the main organiser.

It's work. A lot of work. Fantastically rewarding, though. Around 40 panoramic photographers turned up in Plymouth for a series of talks, show and tell sessions, excursions and - possibly the most important bit - meals where everyone can chat and socialise.

Following on from it's trip to Exmouth Beach, Theo Jansen's Ventosa Siamesis strandbeest came to Princesshay Square in Exeter city centre.

Time for another timelapse! This time covering an hour or so before the strandbeest arrived by lorry, the strandbeest being put together and then several hours of the busy shopping crowds interacting with the strandbeest and the small 'self-pull' beest:

I also shot some video footage:

Every so often, somebody creates something wonderful. Theo Jansen's Strandbeests fit into that category.

Click through for an interactive version.

Through the net I've followed his work for some time now, so when I heard that one of the beasts was coming to Devon for a couple of weeks I was very happy.

Organised by Spacex in Exeter and Amino Arts in Newcastle, a new beast (Ventosa Siamesis) came to Exmouth Beach for three days and will also spend three days in Exeter City Centre, with an exhibition in Spacex and a talk by Theo in the Central Library this Friday (booking required!).

This sounded like a good excuse to do a timelapse, so on Thursday I headed over the Exmouth and did a timelapse movie of the setup day:

Aperture Assistant - the Good the Bad and the Mildly Ugly

Aperture 3 has now been out for several months, but Aperture Assistant doesn’t work with it - by design. There are a number of reasons for this, but it’s not going to stay that way...

The Bad

I’ll start with the bad news. The first bit of bad news is that until two weeks ago I’ve not had time to look at updating Aperture Assistant to work with Aperture 3.

The rest of the bad news is how to get information out of Aperture - there are several different ways to do this:

One is AppleScript, Apple’s scripting language, which Aperture supports quite well. Another is to make an app that works ‘within’ Aperture by building an editing or export plugin and making calls to Aperture through the plug-in framework.
A third is to read information directly from the SQLite3 databases that Aperture uses for day to day storage of information.

A couple of weeks ago the ICCI had a dry run for September's digital arena event. Rather like some of my 'dry runs' up on Haytor shooting footage for the event, it turned out to be somewhat on the damp side once it got the the actual opening...

Anyway, a number of photographers, videographers and artists submitted work for the test run, including 360˚ video, panoramas, 'normal' video ganged 5-up to fit in the cylinder, drawings, computer animations etc.

Anyway, here's a video excerpt of the Haytor timelapse in it's natural habitat:

Following on from Monday's blog post, everything did sync! Having now seen the Haytor piece up on the big screen I have a few ideas for tweaking the presentation to make it stronger, in advance of the main event in September.

Photos and videos to come, but Thursday evening's launch went well.

Ian