Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
I recently returned from tiny Mendocino, California, a coastal town up the road from San Francisco, producing an episode of my PhotowalksTV travel series, and my inbox has been overflooded with questions about the process.
Do I really produce a travel photography series with just mobile cameras? (Mostly.) And how do I go about it? Thanks for asking. Let me tell you about it.
The reaction I’ve gotten from people watching my latest #shotonaniPhone Photowalks video episode has been across the board.
“What camera did you use to shoot this? It looks amazing.” That was the first comment. My sentiment too.
This is related to the one key new feature of the latest iPhone, which is “Cinematic Mode.” It allows the photographer to blur the background as we do in Portrait Mode for iPhone stills, or by shooting with a small F stop on our cameras.
iPhone 7 Plus was the first phone to incorporate “Portrait mode” that adds artificial background blur to your portraits. According to recent reports, Apple is about to apply the same feature to videos very soon, too. The upcoming iPhone 13 will reportedly allow you to shoot videos with artificial background blur. But there are even more video improvements to come, so let’s see what we can expect.
Smartphone gimbals are pretty commonplace today. There are countless models from companies like Zhiyun, Moza, Feiyu, and a million other brands. It feels like we’ve had them forever, although they’ve only really been around for about four years. And sometimes, even today, we need to figure out a way to live without them.
You’re not always going to have it with you when you see something cool and want to whip out your phone to grab a sequence. Or perhaps, as filmmaker Brandon Li mentions in this video, carrying a gimbal defeats the whole purpose of using your phone. Putting his money where his mouth is, this 10-minute video shows us how we can get gimbal-like shots without a gimbal.
In 2015, director Sean Baker and his crew created feature-length movie Tangerine. You may remember the movie, but also the story behind its creation, as it was filmed entirely with three iPhones. Now one of these iPhones is finding its way to the Academy Museum which opens in 2019, and it will honor the art and science of movies.
We just posted about a particularly well made iPhone X video yesterday, profiling French dessert maker Elise Lepinteur. While it is a very nice and polished final product, the phone had a little assistance from sliders, gimbals and 3rd party lenses.
In this video, though, from Matteo Bertoli Visuals, we see the iPhone X footage completely unassisted, handheld. That’s right, no gimbals, no sliders, no bolt-on lenses. He didn’t even use Filmic Pro to film it, he used the phone’s standard app. And it looks pretty amazing.
Josh Klinghoffer, the guitar player of Red Hot Chili Peppers, got fed up with the audience filming the concert with their phones. Instead of playing the solo in “Californication”, he grabs his own smartphone and starts filming the crowd to make a statement.
Like it or not, smartphones are becoming more advanced and provide more possibilities for both filming and photography. Some people use them in addition to their regular photo gear, and some even use only smartphones to take stunning photos. Wedding photographers Kristine and Calen Rhome (aka White in Revery) filmed a wonderful wedding video. This wouldn’t be anything unusual if it wasn’t filmed using only iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus with a few supplemental pieces of gear. Their video proves the famous statement that “it’s not about the gear, it’s about the photographer”. Or in this case: videographer.
The battle between iPhone and DSLR photography is never-ending. The iPhone advocates claim that it’s not about the equipment, it’s about the skill. On the other hand, DSLR photographers get mad at iPhone users who call themselves photographers. Although I love my Nikon DSLRs and hate the quality of the photos I make with my phone, I’m gonna have to agree with the iPhone users on this one.
This is precisely what Parker Walbeck tried to prove in his video, where he compared the footage taken with an iPhone with the one taken with a $50,000 camera. The results may surprise you.
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