Last weekend’s charity walk was a great opportunity to shoot some video on my iPhone, but editing it later, I couldn’t help but think it was a little shaky in places – my hands certainly aren’t as steady as they used to be.
Zhiyun Smooth 4
I’d seen a number of reviews (mostly positive) about smartphone stabilisers or gimbals, so figured that £100 or so for one might be a good investment. There were a huge number of rather superficial reviews for the DJI Osmo 2, but it did seem that Amazon customers in particular didn’t rate it too highly. Further research brought up the Zhiyun Smooth 4 (same £129 price as the DJI Osmo 2) and that did get excellent reviews, other than for its apparent lack of compatibility with Android phones (not a problem for me of course). So one was duly ordered, and arrived yesterday. First impressions on opening the polystyrene carry case was ‘Wow! – this is big!” Although I’d seen photos of it, I kind of expected it would fold down to something that would fit in a modest man bag or sling type camera bag, but ‘noo!’ it doesn’t fold at all and is a good 40cm long.
The Zhiyun ZY Play app
Undeterred, I downloaded the Zhiyun ZY Play app, which allows it to control focus and zoom on the iPhone as well as on/off and subject tracking. Once paired, it maintained position very well indeed, and the zoom knob on the side of the handle controlled the phone beautifully. I was thinking that maybe I could overlook the jumbo proportions and just get a bag big enough to carry it around, when the first disconnect with the phone occurred; it took me several minutes to restart the app and then resync my phone with the device, and then it happened again, and again… Seems that if the phone goes into sleep mode, it drops the connection, and then the app can’t reconnect. On one occasion, not only did I have to close and restart the app, but had to restart my phone too. Fiddling around to get it started again (getting frustrated now…) I got a warning to say my phone was almost flat, even though I had only charged it a few hours before! So an hour or so of carrying the kit around, and literally just a few minutes of actual video shooting runs a phone down completely… Zhiyun helpfully provide a power out USB connection on the unit for charging phones from its own internal rechargeable battery, but a) I didn’t have the requisite lead, and b) the lightning charge port on the phone was blocked when the phone was put in the cradle.
So a fail all round, and the stabiliser, while a nicely engineered item with some good features, will be going back. Regardless of the fact that it isn’t as portable as I’d hoped, something unreliable and that drains the battery in the phone is never going to work for me. I think I may try just a simple pistol grip and phone holder next – no active stabilisation or zoom control of course, but I’ve a feeling it will help keep the phone steady. Happy days…
So the heatwave and drought of Summer 2018 had to stop sometime didn’t it? Well, that was today, and temperatures in the high 20’s were replaced by 18deg, and persistent rain. Not that we didn’t need it of course – the lawn in our garden is completely yellow through lack of rain, so hopefully that will do it some good.
Still, the showers did ease off a little, and I was able to wander around for an hour or so, albeit with camera in one hand and umbrella in the other – wasn’t really sure whether to believe the Sony claims about weather-resistance, but decided not to chance it so kept camera and lens well-covered. Likewise it wasn’t a day for changing lenses either, so stuck with the rather awesome Zeiss 55mm – I know I am a zoom person at heart, but goodness, these prime lenses are so sharp and contrasty!
So despite the weather, I took a few photos of the cars, before heading down to the canal to catch a view of some of the collection of narrow boats that had assembled for the day. Lots of restored classic working narrow boats as well as the usual leisure conversions (I’ll post these photos later).
Although I have some reservations about using my Olympus Micro-Four Thirds (MFT) cameras for landscapes, one area where they come into their own is fast action photography like motor sports. The sensor on all MFT cameras is just one quarter the size of a so-called full frame camera, and although they can still deliver file sizes based on up to 20Mpx, the individual pixels are so-much smaller, so suffer from noise in low light or high contrast situations and this does limit things somewhat, in my opinion. MFT cameras do have a couple of particular advantages though, especially for action photography – the small sensor means that a given focal length lens is equivalent to a lens twice as ‘long’ as one fitted to a full frame camera, and for any given aperture will have a much greater depth of focus. So, in practical terms, the same ‘spec’ lens on an MFT camera will bring things in much closer, and more of the subject will be in focus.
My camera, the Olympus E-M1 mk2, has one other killer feature – ProCapture. Whereas most cameras will focus on the subject when you half press the shutter, and then take one or more photos when you fully press it, Pro Capture starts recording as SOON as you half press the shutter, and ‘buffers’ or keeps the last 12 shots in its memory together with all those after you press the shutter, and these are then written to the memory card. So if you are shooting at one of the lower speeds, like 5 frames a second, you will get a couple of seconds worth of images BEFORE you make that final press of the shutter. How many times have we been looking through the viewfinder waiting for action to happen, like a bird taking off, but by the time we react to the movement, the bird has gone. This camera lets you go back in time!
So last weekend I spent some time at a club motor race meeting at Oulton Park in Cheshire with those nice folks from Olympus UK Events. I already had my E-M1ii of course but was pleased to try both a 40-150mm Pro lens, and the 300mm f4 Pro lens (they were loaning out cameras too if anyone wanted to try those). A great opportunity to ‘try before you buy’ given that the 300mm lens is around £2000 to buy. Also on hand to help were Lewis Speight, one of the technical gurus from Olympus UK, and Mike Inkley, a pro sports photographer. So off we went trackside to record the cars that were racing that day – some modern sports/touring cars, but some classic sports cars too.
Lets just say that the equipment we were using was amazing – the ability to fill the frame and focus on fast moving cars from the other side of the safety barrier, and record bursts of up to 40 shots as the cars went past or crested the top of the hill at Lodge Corner! I did however fill a complete memory card during my morning session – over 3000 images – so needless to say sorting through these and picking the best from each sequence took some time!
We had booked a couple of nights at Bunchrew House Hotel, just outside Inverness, as we had missed Inverness out at the start of our trip. Turned out to be a very good choice – excellent food, comfortable room, great service etc, but the highlight was the choice of gins in the bar.
of tonic, all served with the recommended garnishes etc. With a couple of other pre and post dinner drinks over the two days, I think that took my tally of new gins for the trip up to about 15… Great views from the hotel over the Beauly Firth, including a spectacular sunset.
if not particularly high falls.
40metres – talk about scary! The whole structure was shaking (or was it just me?) Absolutely incredible, and there are several other falls all coming into the same point, before the river rushes on. If you’ve got time, you can follow a path all the way to the base of the falls, but when in full flow (as they were when we were there) the spray will soak anyone on the path.
And so down through Fort William and into Glencoe with a brief side trip along Glen Etive in search of more deer (no luck, just some crazy kayakers shooting the rapids).
Tongue Hotel turned out to be a good choice (to be fair there aren’t many hotels around here anyway!) – one of our fellow guests was BBC’s Jeremy Paxman, so we figured if it was ok for him, then it was ok for us. A (relatively) early start next morning as we had to be in Dunnet Bay by 11am for our pre-booked tour of the Dunnett Bay Distillery – home of Rock Rose, one of our favourite gins. Our tour (we were the only ones there) took almost an hour and a half, and we learned so much about the gin process, helped along by sampling several of their products! Definitely worth a stop if you are passing that way, and well worth the £12 pp cost.
We briefly stopped at the Castle of Mey, one time summer holiday home of the Queen Mother – it was pretty busy there and we only needed to use the loo, so onward… Interestingly, the whole physical geography changed along here – although there were cliffs all along the coastline, just inland it was pretty flat, and the harsh gorse and heather landscape changed to mostly pasture.
Nigel Young 