But at 60, Mr Quinn, of Dunedin, began to believe his career as a cameraman had reached its peak and that maybe he should think about winding down.
However, the move by NHNZ to filming 3D programmes for the Discovery Channel found him in Los Angeles on a pressure-cooker course at the Sony studio with Mike Single and Alex Hubert.
"I reached out and grabbed this opportunity with two hands."
Mr Quinn has recently returned from filming overseas for NHNZ, which is providing 28 documentaries for Discovery. He planned to be filming in such famous United States sites as Yellowstone, Yosemite and Moab, a town in Utah surrounded by national parks.
Death Valley and the Hawaiian volcanoes were also due to be filmed in 3D.
He had an exciting start to his career, filming the damage from the Inangahua earthquake, on the West Coast.
The earthquake in Christchurch last year brought back memories of that time and the difference in news coverage, he said.
"At Inangahua, it was the boss and me, and that was the full extent of the television coverage of a huge event. I was scared. We were flown in on an air force helicopter, dropped off, and they said 'see you in an hour' and left me to it as the aftershocks continued."
Filming was done with a hand camera.
The Pike River Coal tragedy also hit home for Mr Quinn as his uncle, Joe Quinn, had been a cameraman on the West Coast. His mother was the daughter of a Canadian coal miner and his father and uncles were coal miners around Blackball.
Joe Quinn was the West Coast television stringer and filmed the results of the Strongman mine disaster in 1967. The media coverage was Mr Quinn, a television reporter and a reporter from the Greymouth Evening Star.
"That was the extent of the media coverage compared with the media scrum now," he said.
Coal mining and filming was in his blood, Mr Quinn said. He did a lot of filming on the West Coast for television's Town and Around programme, and although he spent a lot of time down mines, he could not go down some of them because of the risk of creating sparks from the clockwork camera he used. North of Westport, there was no gas in the mines and the camera was allowed in.
For Mr Quinn, the Pike River tragedy was a poignant reminder, as his father had been trapped in a mine during the Murchison earthquake. His father was 18 or 19 and worked pushing the coal trucks to the ledge, tipping the coal out and taking the trucks back into the mine. He was trapped by a rock-fall and found himself on his own in a tunnel blocked by rocks.
Turning on his lamp, Mr Quinn's father found an air vent that had been dug into the mine and managed to wiggle his way out just as the search party was being formed.
Lately, Mr Quinn has been grappling with the technical issues of filming in 3D.
There was some training organised in Dunedin for the two cameras that sit side by side. The aim was to create a point of convergence for the cameras, manipulating the image to what you wanted the audience to focus on, he said.
There were positive and negative parallax in 3D filming, with positive behind the scene and negative in front, sort of like an arm reaching out of a window.
Positive was good, but care needed to be taken with the negative parallax because sometimes it was hard for the audience to deal with the image. Often, the negative parallax was used in 3D movies for effect, such as something leaping out into the audience.
"Every single shot you have to look at and decide where you want the point of convergence. For a wide scene, you slide the cameras apart. You can have stuff in the negative, as long as the eye can cope with it. The closer the object is to you, the closer the cameras are together.
"You have to take a conservative approach to filming for television in 3D, as it is hard to watch some effects on TV.
"People say it could be a fad, but what they don't realise is that technology has nailed 3D and electronics has nailed 3D."
Two-dimensional filming was "point and shoot". If you saw a whale, you could zoom in to the full extent of the lens in 2D filming. With 3D, it was not possible to zoom in as the 3D effect was lost. To film a close-up, you had to get physically close up to what you were filming, Mr Quinn said.
"You have to rethink the way you can do things."
What some people did not realise was how long 3D had been around, he said. In the early 1950s, House of Wax and Dial M for Murder were filmed in 3D. In the 1980s, Jaws was filmed in 3D and there had always been 3D in IMAX theatres.
Now, it had been "nailed" for everyone because of technology.
"It has been a sharp learning curve. We have to meet the technology specifications, which are quite high for channels like Discovery. We have to make sure we have the right gear. But it is fantastic."
