A bit of a channel update!

Hi everyone,

A bit of a milestone this month - this Patreon page has now been up for an entire year! When I started this 12 months ago, I really had no idea how much interest it would attract, but so far we're up to 120 members, and I'm really thrilled at how many people have been willing to support the channel directly here. As I touched on in the last update, the channel has started to become a substantial part of how I make my income, and this has really helped justify spending more time on it - so the support I get here really has led to more, and higher-effort content being produced.

Pictured above is the main workhorse of my camera fleet, my 5D MkIII, which is now in it's 11th year of service. While it's starting to show a bit of wear and tear, this camera never lets me down, and despite only shooting video in 1080p, it's still my best option for shooting certain things, like highly stable telephoto shots. It's also responsible for pretty much all my still shots.  It's seen here a few weeks back filming a timelapse on the busiest tram corridor in the world, outside the National Gallery. This is for what I expect to be the next video up, which will look at the St Kilda Rd/Swanston Street tram operations. I actually had this video quite well advanced about a month ago, but then Yarra Trams decided to do a major track and signal renewal at the Melbourne Uni terminus, and I decided to wait until they finished in case they made changes that would contradict what I said in the video. I've had a look at the new arrangements now (only minor changes as it turns out) so that video is now pretty close to complete.

After getting out quite a lot of videos recently, I'm expecting things to slow down a little for the next few weeks, partly because I'm getting a bit snowed under with some other work, but also because there are a few longer videos in the pipeline which will take a bit longer to polish off - the Upfield line video (next in the series from my 40 min Hurstbridge line video) is almost ready to record. At this stage, I expect it will be almost as long as the Hurstbridge line one. For a line that might seem quite simple, I've managed to find a lot to say about it, and I'm quite excited to see how it all comes together.

Last week I was briefly in Sydney, and managed to get a few shots I needed for some Sydney videos I've had in the works for ages - I've got three partly written, one of which is on a topic that might come as a bit of a surprise! More on these as they start to come together.

Thanks for your support!

~Martin