Dolnik

This is the footage I shot on a two week backpacking trip on my own around Europe. This two weeks was a little vacation after a 1.5 month Simon Fraser University Italian Design Field School (Italia Design 2009) The Trip starts in Milan then goes to Zurich, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris, Pisa, then finally in Rome. This video had well over 6000 pictures taken for just the timelapses.

This video portrays some of the amazing sights I saw during a 1.5 month Simon Fraser University Italian Design Field School (Italia Design 2009 Gruppo Sei) The Trip starts in Rome, then to Tuscany (Montepulciano, Orvieto, Cortona, Pitigliano, Dolciano), then to Florence, then finally in Milan. I would have to say this was the experience of a lifetime and I would say this video sums it up pretty well, but not enough. This video had well over 32,000 pictures taken for just the timelapses!

After many years with no changes, it was decided that a custom CMS wasn't cutting it anymore for this website. I decided to port the existing website, which the old version still remains at portfolio.dolnik.ca, to utilize Drupal instead.

This involved not only creating the data structures and importing the existing data, but also porting over the existing theme to work with Drupal's templating system.

Drupal not only helped improve the ease at which to add/edit new content, but also allowed for an increase in performance due to its powerful caching system.

In 2010 construction started on the new roof of BC place stadium in Vancouver and I decided to try at an ambitious project of capturing a timelapse animation of over a year and a half's worth of construction. Setting up a webcam at a friend's place across the street from the stadium, I created a simple program in Max/MSP to capture images at a varying intervals, and upload straight to my website.

I also added the ability to change the capture interval remotely, and set a different capture rate for daytime and night time. When the pictures were all taken (550,000 of them) I created a crude application in flash (which never left the prototype phase) that will load certain pictures and play them as a video with an adjustable date range or other features.

I also had ideas to filter out pictures with bad weather so I added code that reads a weather almanac website and adds that information over to the picture database, this information is also relayed over onto the timelapse player to give a sense of the weather at the time of each picture.

While making tweaks to the home page animation, I needed more control over the animation to ensure there are no performance issues or bugs. I decided to make some simple controls for the various aspects of the animation. I decided to make these controls public as an easter egg when the dolnik.ca logo is clicked within the animation to help show the different aspects of how the animation works.

When the public perception and presence of Adobe Flash was dwindling, the Flash-based home page of dolnik.ca needed an update. Utilizing recent web technology such as Html5, CSS3, and Greensock animation platform, I was able to recreate the animated time lapse mountain scenery of the Flash version, as well as update the look and feel of the clouds to add more realism. The scene shown is a videoscape of a mountain top setting based off of a picture of myself during a hike up one of the local mountains around Vancouver.

After 5+ years of having a flash-only based website, dolnik.ca was due for an upgrade. After having a good look around at what the current web practices are, I decided to re-create dolnik.ca and go with a mobile-first based responsive design using Twitter's open source Bootstrap framework as a foundation.

In the name of reusability and for the ease of future updates, I ensured that most of the pages are highly templated, and pull their content from a simple custom CMS using a combination of PHP and MySQL. As for the general design I looked towards a flat and simple, yet textured layout, with a parallax background with a layer in front that resembles a scratched-up frosted glass.

When the public perception and presence of Adobe Flash was dwindling, the Flash-based picture viewer of dolnik.ca needed an update. Utilizing various current web technologies, I was able to build off of the back-end of the current PHP/MySQL image database that I am using for the Flash version, to create a Non-Flash version of the picture viewer.

For the background image, I used php to pull the highest rated / most viewed image from the current collection and added a blur effect to give the current page a theme that represents the current image collection. At this point the more advanced features of the Flash version such as searching by location, tags, and dates are not incorporated yet, but will be in the near future.

I first started getting into photography in 2004 when I enrolled in a photography course at SFU. This initial interest grew into a hobby when I acquired my first Canon SLR in 2005. Since then this has lead me to amass an extensive portfolio of over 40,000+ pictures spanning a diverse range of subjects, including objects, people, and landscapes.

This is a collection of the various photography I do on my free time put together with a custom image viewer which originally was built in Adobe Flash and later ported to HTML.