Changing the Guard
This year has been a frustrating one in terms of settling for long-term gear. I’ve wasted so much money on swapping out perfectly good kit for new stuff that I believed would make life easier and last until the end of my career, and the latest wave of replacements has resulted in selling a pile of stuff that I hated using (mirrorless Nikon gear and accessories, basically). Shooting video for estate agencies is a royal pain in the arse as far as I’m concerned - they want Hollywood-style output at zero cost, and there are plenty of desperate folk who will do just that in order to get a foothold in the industry. That foothold never turns into a solid grip on the cliff-face of estate agency work. The imminent loss of my biggest client has sharpened my resolve to reduce my dependency on such clients and move into more skilled architectural and design-led workflows - not an easy task in the economic desert of the far north of England.
Anyway, with the departure of my hated mirrorless system and the awfulness of the DJI Ronin rig that I never managed to master despite repeated attempts to re-educate myself, I needed a replacement to shoot basic HD videos inside properties, and perhaps do some personal video work as well. After some detailed research, I plumped for the diminutive but powerful DJI Osmo Pocket 3 camera. It’s tiny, but can shoot 4k 60fps and HD at 120fps - which affords some great slow motion opportunities once output at 30fps. The lens is fixed at about 18mm as opposed to my 12mm Laowa previously utilised on my expensive video setup, so the angle of view is more narrow, but this can be altered by using the wide-angle lens adapter which changes it to a slightly wider view of 15mm. The adapter unfortunately introduces quite severe barrel distortion at the edges which can be later mitigated by using the lens correction function in Adobe Premiere Pro video editing software.
I’ve not used the camera in working conditions yet - my diary is blank until early December, so I’ll be practicing and developing an ultra-efficient workflow until then. I anticipate that this should cut loads of time out of my video-shooting efforts, and will definitely reduce the load of video gear that i’m forced to carry.
