If a picture is worth a thousand words, what will 65,000 pictures tell you?
Tumultuous Tasmania is a timelapse film I spent eight months making – driving into pre-dawn darkness, waiting out storms, setting up motion control rigs in places most people never reach, and watching Tasmania do what it does best: put on a show.
The idea was simple. Showcase the beauty of this island through the discipline of timelapse – a medium that reveals what the naked eye misses. The way clouds build and collapse over a mountain ridge in minutes. The way the Milky Way wheels overhead while the world below stays perfectly still. The way first light turns a forest floor from black to gold in the space of a few breaths.
What followed was anything but simple.
Watch the film
The making of it
Timelapse at this scale is as much engineering as it is photography. Each sequence requires planning the location, the movement, the interval, the duration – and then showing up, often multiple times, until the conditions are right. You might spend a night in the cold and come home with nothing usable. You do it again.
Over eight months I accumulated over 65,000 individual frames across Tasmania’s mountains, coastlines, forests, and night skies. The sequences were then graded, stabilised, and assembled into the film above.
Motion control equipment was used throughout – motorised sliders and pan-tilt heads that allow the camera to move slowly and precisely during a long exposure sequence, adding a cinematic quality that static timelapse can’t achieve. Getting that equipment into remote locations adds another layer of planning, and more than a few very heavy packs.
As seen in
Over the years, my photography and film work has been featured in:
- Australian Geographic
- Tasmanian Geographic
- Tasmania 40 Degrees South
- Lume Magazine
- Aurora Chasers Handbook
In 2015, I won the overall photography prize at the Tasmanian Night Sky Photography Awards.
What this led to
Making Tumultuous Tasmania changed how I work. Spending that much time in the field – watching sequences rather than single moments – deepened my understanding of light, weather, and place in ways that still inform every photograph I make.
It also led directly to my work in astrophotography and cave photography – two disciplines that require the same patience, the same willingness to be somewhere uncomfortable for a long time, and the same obsession with light that doesn’t behave the way you expect.
Tasmania rewards that kind of attention. There is always something happening here, if you are willing to wait for it.
Want to experience Tasmania’s landscapes firsthand? Join me on one of my photography workshops – small groups, wild places, and plenty of time to slow down and pay attention.