Listen To The City Breathe: 2. Filming Gear p1: Cameras and iPhones

Again, I don't know anything about any of this, so I had very little idea of where to start, even. I had seen a lot of ads on tv and in the media about people using Apple iPhones6 to shoot high quality images and video. I knew that my iPhone6 had a better camera than my simple point-and-click Canon Elph, so that was a nice place to start.

Another welcomed addition to my filming arsenal was a second iPhone. My girlfriend has a job where they gave her an iPhone, since she travels so much for work. I am lucky because that means that when she is not traveling, I get to use it. I love the freedom of using a second camera, because it allows me to add a bit more variety to the final product. Instead of viewing the subject from only one angle, I get to move around, from one angle to another. The second advantage of using more than one camera is that it allows me to better edit-out parts of an interview that express some kind of dead-air. That is, if I want the pace of the discussion to increase, I can edit out certain parts of the interview, and the final product will look more smooth, as if I didn't cut out a chunk of the discussion. This goes for long sentences that I want to cut out, or even the briefest of pauses.

However, due to storage limitations and other emergencies that might come up, I also carry around my point-and-click Canon Elph that is several years old. The problem with this camera is that while I have a ton of storage (on a backup card), the video is limited to hd720.

One thing you'll notice in this photo is that I simply rubber-band one iPhone to the tripod. I like to improvise. One stupid limitation of using iPhones is that they don't easily attach to tripods, so I have to come up with things like this.