John Aldred
@john-aldred
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Posts
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I just tell people I shoot animals in the studio and people in the wild. Usually, they just nod, and about a second later, they’re like “Wait, what? Isn’t that normally the other way around?” and ask me more about it. :)
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I have some thoughts. Some of these will definitely be more challenging than others, and some might not even be possible anymore with modern sensors and chips – but it’s a feature I miss from my older action cameras.
- I’d like to see better HDMI output support over the USB port so we can use a $10 USB-C hub for laptops and smartphones instead of large, expensive, dedicated UVC to HDMI converters.
- And/or, I’d like to see more composite video output support again (perhaps no longer possible) for FPV.
- I want to see better wired remote trigger support (yes, I made it bold, it’s not AI, that’s how badly I want this) through the USB port. Why can’t we fire these with an external trigger or intervalometer like we can any MFT, APS-C, “full”-frame, medium-format camera?
- Now that action cameras are getting timecode support, a more consistent feature set between brands (and cameras) would be nice. And I’m not talking about companies sharing their secret sauce. I mean, implement protocols that have been around for decades and have standards properly. I’ve got at least five or six different devices now that can either accept or output SMPTE timecode (some do both), and not all of them work with all my action cameras that have native timecode support. They can’t handle timecode only being on one channel while mixed L+R mic audio is in the other. So you have to reconfigure your mic to output timecode to both channels to sync it, then reconfigure the mic back to how it was to put it on your camera. It’s early days for timecode support in action cameras, though, so I expect they’ll figure it out in another generation or two.
- I also want better multicam triggering. If I’ve got a dozen action cameras from the same brand, I should be able to load up an app, hit a button and have ’em all fire off at, as precisely as possible, the same time. This would be great for things like 3D scanning and Gaussian splats with lightweight gear.
- It’d be REALLY nice to have a proper tablet app that actually utilises the full screen and lets me see all of those cameras in a single UI that lets me view them all (obviously, I’d be willing to accept a much smaller bitrate stream if there’s a dozen of ’em on the screen at once, heh), or zoom in to see/control/tweak a single one – like a CCTV video wall that lets you zoom into playback an individual camera, or the way the YoloBox Extreme lets you zoom in and out to an individual input when you’ve got a bunch of cameras wired into it. Even if the multicam support doesn’t come, a nicely designed iPad app for remote monitoring and control (like, when you’ve got one hidden for capturing wildlife or something) would be fantastic. Or at least let us rotate our phones horizontally! *cough* Insta360 *cough*. Sorry, I don’t mean to call Insta360 out there, but this is the #1 reason why I literally never use the app and do everything on the desktop, regardless of what other features I get on a phone.
I’m not calling any manufacturer out with this (well, except that last bit about the Insta360 mobile app 😂). All of the big names make good cameras. But it still feels like they’ve not matured as quickly as they could have. The Sony RX0 was a good start in a lot of ways. I wanted about 20 of ’em. But it was way too expensive for the mainstream consumer market (and definitely out of my budget at the time), and many of its features (like timecode) remained exclusive and high-end. They are only coming now, almost a decade later, coming to consumer action cameras.
So, I think there’s still a lot that can be done with action cameras, but the current chip shortages probably won’t help action camera innovation in the short term.
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Very weird but very cool, haha. Surprisingly detailed prints.
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Not recently. Fortunately, I managed to get enough storage last year before all the prices went up to see me through for the next few years, hopefully. I wouldn’t want to be buying today, although prices are starting to dip a little. They’re nowhere near mid-2025 prices again yet (that’ll be a while, still, I think), but some of them are starting to fall a little.
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I used to hate being in front of the camera. Then one day, I met up with about a dozen other photographers to go hang out in Manchester doing street photography. We split off into groups of 2 or 3 and went exploring, meeting back up every so often, bumping into each other while shooting… I ended up in so many photos that day (whether incidentally or intentionally), I just kinda stopped caring about being in front of the camera anymore.
For video, it was a whole thing again. If anyone’s thinking about doing it, just go shoot and edit a couple of videos start to finish and delete ’em. You’ll screw up, but nobody will ever see them but you, and you’ll learn what you need to work on, both in terms of your presenting style and editing. Eventually, you’ll get so engrossed in figuring out and tweaking the editing that you’ll get used to how you are on camera and it won’t bother you. Just shoot and edit as many videos for yourself as you need.
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