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Dan Tidwell’s career as a photographer took off when he worked on NASA’s Project Apollo in the 1960s.

Tidwell, now 68 and principal of Image Engineering Photography in Portland, was an engineering student at Sacramento State University at the time. He used a variety of technical equipment to document construction of the Saturn rocket, he said.

“They wanted pictures of everything,” he said. “They wanted to see how it was built.”

The job steered Tidwell toward other photography opportunities, including work in Long Beach, Calif., as an industrial photographer for McDonnell Douglas and as a diagnostic imaging engineer for General Electric.

“Photography has been my window to the world,” he said. “It has enabled me to do everything I was able to do.”

Decades later, Tidwell spends substantial time producing videos for construction companies. The most noted effort came in January, when he shot a two-minute time-lapse video of the Sellwood Bridge relocation project, which took 18 hours. He mounted 10 cameras on or near the bridge and compiled a mix of real-time video, time-lapse imaging and still images into one finished product.

The video uses GigaPan technology, which allows the user to zoom in and out on the image and gain a high-definition viewpoint that has 100 times more resolution than a normal camera.

The footage captured significant local, national and international attention for the bridge.

“My presentation was not the point,” Tidwell said. “The point was that the bridge moved. It wasn’t Dan Tidwell. It was the Sellwood Bridge.”

Tidwell calls himself a “digitalographer” because of the amount of post-production work that he performs. Each minute of video typically requires 20 hours of shop time to produce, he said.

He currently has photographic equipment set up at 10 Portland-metro work sites, including the Sellwood Bridge, a wastewater treatment facility in Portland, a residence in West Linn and commercial projects in Hood River, he said.

Contractors use his footage for marketing, archival and security purposes.

“It’s the history that I’m going to get from the camera that’s going to pay,” said Ted Aadland, area manager for Tempe, Ariz.-based Sundt Construction Inc., which is part of the Sellwood Bridge joint venture. “Whether I’m instructing a class with future engineers or showing a client what kind of different things we can do, Tidwell has an eye and understanding for what the camera can catch.”

Jeff Pickhardt, president of Hood River-based Key Development Corp., has contracted with Image Engineering Photography for four commercial building projects in Hood River. Key Development uses Tidwell’s services to monitor construction progress, market projects and meet insurance requirements, Pickhardt said.

“The unique thing about Dan is it’s a one-stop shop – he installs, he services and maintains, and he creates the movie,” he said. “He’s also good at notifying you about potential security issues. Dan has a tendency to shoot an email and let you know if something is up.”

Tidwell himself encounters problems caused from spiderwebs and birds.

“I’m often out at the sites once a week to make sure that the camera is always running,” he said. “Sometimes the cameras need cleaning or someone will park a truck in front of them. I keep an eye on all those sites.”

Tidwell bills his customers for setup, maintenance and post-production. Setup generally costs $1,000 per camera. Maintenance, which includes daily collection and archiving of information, runs about $250 per month per camera. Post-production costs $1,000 per minute of finished video, he said.