“It isn’t until you start thinking about worlds colliding that the limitations of video start to grate”
The strangeness of the things I am being sent by manufacturers has, I sincerely hope, reached its peak. Item the first: a battery pack booster for shutterbug smartphoners, with a Bluetooth picture-taking button and a wireless charging pad up close to the phone.
This is quite some stretch away from my comfort zone of servers and switches, but not without some quirky details that set me thinking about IT’s colliding-worlds phenomenon. Where things can look perfectly normal and yet, right there beside you, different solutions and expenditures are justified only because they grew up “in a different world”.
In the case of the ShiftCam ProGrip, the crossover could hardly be any humbler. I’ve yet to see a smartphone with a tripod mount threaded hole anywhere round the edges of the casing, but surely that time is coming. After all, if you want to make a video, then the immense body of knowledge on that topic reveals that at least one camera must stay perfectly still for the duration of each part of the scene/interview/cat movie.
However, a still phone is quite hard to set up, especially if you still need to touch the screen now and again. With this funny little grip, you’ll be touching the screen a lot, because the edges of the phone grip plate curl over the sides of the phone,
