Welcome to a new edition of RP the Substack about photography, walking, exploring and now video too. I’ve posted video on this platform in the past and I want to start exploring the idea of recording videos whilst out on photowalks. I know many YouTubers do this sort of thing but I want to share that content here, a mixture of free and some “gated” content or so to speak, where the effort involved is higher. A lot of the time I just throw posts and videos together and I don’t mind giving that away for freebies, not one bit but the weeks I do some extra work on these projects, I feel that is worth putting up for paid subscribers, some might say it’s tricky to do but I don’t think so, a lot of work can go into producing written, recorded and videos content.
So with that in mind, I am looking at doing a short term offer for people, annual subs with a discount, watch this space.
I say watch this space because I am still contemplating merging these newsletters into one and using sections instead, we shall see…. undecided…. but that will make it easier to run paid subscriptions, one publisher who writes about music on the iPad, walking, photos etc etc…. you can pick and choose which bits you want to read.
In the meantime this newsletter and
are gaining new subscribers day by day, thanks to Notes by the looks of it.Anyway, that’s that out of the way and onto the main topic of the day!
360 degrees!
This week I took delivery of my new camera, the second new camera in a fortnight, but I was looking for a new video device to explore new content ideas with. I chose the Insta360 x3 over the Hero 11 and the Osmo Action 3 and Pocket 2. The choice was largely driven by the concept of being able to compose and edit in post production, this is just purely mind blowing, to experience the process for the first time with headphones on, connected up to my iPad Pro was an utter delight because not only is the video 360, the audio is too, hearing the bird song, river sounds, people talking and even (on a different recording) a bee buzzing by.
I’ve found that I can create multiple videos from one source, the video here is a jump cut, which means I’ve taken some extracts from the original recording to make a shorter snappier edit in 16:9 ratio but I can go back to the source file and make a totally different edit for let’s say, Instagram Reels and for that one I add music, perhaps throw in a few gimmicky effects too!
It’s worth noting that the iOS apps don’t export anything more than 1080p HD, in order to export at higher resolutions, you need to use the desktop app, Insta360 Studio 2023 for that.
Whilst travelling though, I take a set of micro-SD cards with me, so I’ve got a lot of capacity and can wait till I get back to produce 4k videos for online distribution. I will share the 1080 stuff though but these will be shorter cuts, the longer higher res footage takes a bit more time and is likely to go out as one long YouTube video with all of the text overlays, voiceovers and music.
Quite often I find wi-fi to be slow or patchy at best when travelling, so 1080 is perfect in those situations! Not only that I want to spend more time making photographs and recording video, the hardcore editing can to be honest wait till we are back in the UK.
Keep your eyes peeled this week, Tuesday onwards for a lot of content from me on this newsletter. I’m going to do a series of short punchy posts, some with video, photo and some with both - this will be from our rapidly approaching Funchal trip.
I’ll leave it at that, I need a break too, the trip is a holiday and I want to consolidate my online life massively, as I’v spread myself too thin and I want to get back to producing quality, focussed content….
TTFN!
Insta360 x3 - Trying it out along the Thames Path, Pangbourne Meadows