I'm sure you know the most popular street photography trend that new YouTube
channels go to, and that is the street photography POV video.
Now, these videos can be done exceptionally well if you're the right
person for the job, but for the rest of us, we do them terribly.
So what if I showed you an alternative?
The alternative to shooting street photography POVs that is a low barrier
to entry and create a visual story while you display your photos in a
YouTube video. Because at the end of the day,
that's what a POV video is for. This video is proudly sponsored by
FeiyuTech. More on them later in this video.
Street photography videos have been a bit of a weird place for a while
now. Some great creators have made great POVs,
but maybe this shouldn't be the standard format for every creator.
Not all of us are extroverts who want to shoot street photography videos.
And my advice from my experience would be if you're not someone who can
confidently perform for a camera they're wearing while also taking photos, while
also interacting with the public, maybe steer clear of street photography POVs and
double down on what you're better at. Of course, we still want to show
our images to people that might be interested and do so within an interesting
visual story, which is what POVs tend to facilitate.
My problem with shooting POVs has always been the pressure of recording for, say,
30 minutes at a time and trying to get as many good shots as
possible within that time frame. I find it hard to shoot the
video and shoot the photos both well at the same time.
It feels like there's a trade off happening, so I prefer to shoot all
my photos in my own time. No rush.
Just take your time and enjoy the process and then capture video to kind
of support those photos after the fact. To know how we can fix our
street photography POV approach, we need to know what a POV actually accomplishes.
Street POV videos do three things really well.
First, they show the process of taking photos.
Second, they bring the viewer along into their world in their local town.
And third, they create a story around the images that they take.
The alternative to shooting a POV is just to go out and shoot your
photos as you normally would, and then going out and shooting your photography
process separately. You can do this at the same
time taking photos as you would, and when you get to a nice location,
shoot some video. But there's no pressure to do it
all at once. You could shoot all of your photos
over a day, a week, a month, however long.
And then when you finally feel like you've got a nice set of photos
from a particular walk to put together, you can go out and shoot that
photography walk purely in a video sense.
Doing this does not mean having to bring a whole bag full of camera
equipment. We can actually do this with a
much lower barrier to entry.
Introducing the pocket three from FeiyuTech.
FeiyuTech sent me this pocket three in order to make this video.
However, this script was actually shelved for me for a while because I
wanted to find a way to be able to make video more accessible to
photographers who are not videographers. First, a lot of street photography videos
we see come from street photographers who are also quite handy with video.
And this pocket three makes soul shooting in this city a breeze.
But before we get into the process of using this for shooting street
photography videos, first let's talk about some street focused specs.
We have our modular design, a wireless remote, a magnetic base that's definitely
the best thing here. Three axis stabilisation, fantastic.
A twelve megapixel Sony Sensor. We get four k at sixty frames
per second. We have a 16 millimetre focal length,
which is nice and wide. We get a log picture profile.
We have manual exposure control, manual white balance control.
We have three angle views of super wide, wide and narrow.
And we have AI face and object tracking, which we'll get more into later
with using the phone app. Battery wise, we have 116 minutes of
battery in 1080p at thirty fps.
If you've ever filmed yourself outside using an interchangeable lens camera,
you'll know a lot of the problems we run into having large tripods, large
lenses, attracting attention, missing focus, light changing, Nd philtres, the
list goes on. With the pocket three, a lot of
these problems are solved. However, it is a tradeoff.
We are using a smaller sensor, we have less flexible optics, we don't have
manual aperture, but we get wireless control, we get instant image preview, we
get AI tracking that also provides camera movement.
And we get the ability to mount the camera at any height we need
on a metallic surface. There are three main orientations that
I've been using the pocket three in when shooting street photography video.
The first is the magnetic mounting mode using the magnetic base plate on the
bottom of the camera module. I've been using this to stick it
onto metal surfaces to get higher angle handsfree shots of me in a scene.
Luckily bumped into a guy who was BMXing in St.
Peters Square, so I chucked the pocket three on the front of his BMX
while he rode around a little bit.
The second I've been using is actually with the tripod just stuck to the
bottom of the camera and then controlling the camera using either the remote or
the mobile app. And the third has been keeping the
handle and the tripod all together in a full gimbal handheld mode.
And I've been using this a little bit to shoot myself while I'm taking
photos, also to get kind of reverse shots of me taking photos and also
to get kind of a POV esque shot while putting it either in a
chest pocket or strapping it onto my bag.
You can actually get the POV effect without wearing a camera.
The 16 millimetre focal length from this camera is perfect considering right now
that my main camera is currently shooting at 17 millimetres you can see just
how wide this field of view is. So having 16 millimetres with you in
such a pocketable stabilised setup is great for self shooting.
And particularly good is the fact that you don't really see like the Vlogging
arm while you're shooting this kind of thing.
One problem I have noticed with the lens and the camera setup has been
sometimes it's focusing on the background without noticing me in the foreground.
Particularly on the first couple of times I went out shooting with the camera.
I found a lot of the shots when I got back, seemed to have
focused on the background and never really picked up on me.
Even when I was taking up a large part of the frame and my
face was visible. Since I've been shooting with a pocket
three and experimenting what I can do with this camera, it has unlocked a
fair few angles when shooting street photography that I would have completely
avoided otherwise. For example, there's this high angle shot
that I've kind of been looking at getting for a while and I've shot
it a couple of times now at the pocket three and it's in a
particular part of Manchester that has a nice little view over this marina.
I just wanted a shot of me walking into there and then using my
camera. But even for me as a videographer
or someone else as a videographer, we would have to hold a camera up
on a dedicated gimbal to get that angle or on a very tall tripod.
But with the pocket three I can just take it off and put the
magnetic plate up as high as I can reach and then get whatever shot
I need moving the angle with the wireless remote.
My two complaints that I have with the pocket three camera, I have just
touched on one of them. One of them was manual exposure.
In general, manual exposure has been good once it's set and I'm confident that
it's set, but sometimes I'll power off the camera and the remote and I'll
get it out to get a shot again.
And just because I forget, I don't double cheque I'm on manual exposure again
and it's gone on to auto and it tends to auto expose and to
be honest, the auto exposure I've been finding is not where I want it
at all. Sometimes really favouring backlit skies
and by the time I've noticed it, it's too late.
That is totally fixable as long as you just cheque that it is on
manual exposure and it hasn't gone back to auto.
So I'm trying out the tracking a little bit at the moment and it
does seem to follow me a little bit.
But there is a lot of lag between the software on the phone seeing
me and then the camera responding, which kind of means that you have to
move pretty slow to be able to accommodate it to actually keep yourself
in frame, which this isn't great for the sort of thing I wanted to
use it for. But to be honest, this is more
like a party trick versus like an essential tool.
The overall flexibility of being able to put the camera anywhere and then setting
up your shots manually has already unlocked so much for me.
Like, nobody notices the camera, but
sometimes the camera doesn't recognise me. So this is object tracking now, and
see, it works, but you have to move pretty slow.
If I was to actually walk at a realistic pace right now, it's going
to lose me pretty much straight away. Oh, it's already lost me.
It lost me ages ago, you see. So it gets completely stuck and then
you kind of have to wait a minute for the camera to wake up
and realise what's happened and it slowly looks your way.
And the main problem with this is that the object and face tracking are
most useful when using the phone app. It just seems that there's a lot
of lag between the phone app and the camera, whereas when you use it
with the remote, it's definitely got much better sync.
Possibly the thing I was most excited about when shooting with a pocket three
for shooting street stuff was whether or not people would notice the camera while
I was sort of using it in a scene.
Because if I set up a camera on a tripod, be a small pocket
tripod, or a normal big video tripod, people are going to notice the camera.
You're going to attract attention, security guards, just people wanting to
jump in front of the shot. But the pocket three, you can see
from some of these shots, people are just walking by with groups of them,
whatever. And if I put the camera in
an odd enough place, or just out the way, nobody's actively looking out for
a little camera mounted on a lamppost or against the metallic wall.
And for me, this feels more natural than wearing a camera on my chest
to go out and film. And it also feels a bit more
natural, although you do make some trade offs compared to shooting with a dedicated
mirrorless camera. There are going to be times where
the pocket three is the one that I'll use.
But as someone who has been a videographer first, I am still going to
use mirrorless cameras with dedicated lenses to get a variety of detailed
shot types with flexible optics. If you're a photographer first and you
just want to create some video content to demonstrate your work on YouTube, this
is going to solve a lot of your problems.
One of the biggest problems I've had when shooting street photography videos,
which this sounds like such a weird problem to have, but those who have
made videos like this will understand. You want to get shots that feel
realistic. You want to get shots that feel
like someone's there with you. And always having the camera pointing up
doesn't really feel like that. You look up my nose far too
often. So having something that I can get
up to a height, like on a lamppost, on a metallic wall, wherever it
might be that it can get up to my shoulder height, does so much
in terms of being able to get someone up to my realistic eye level
when shooting street photography. The Pocket Three's magnetic base, I think
might be one of my favourite things I've seen in a little device like
this in a while. This is the smallest little camera module
I've ever been able to use, and having this magnetic base makes it so
anonymous. The second I got this out of
its box and tried out the magnetic base for myself, I had a light
bulb just go off in my head and I thought about all the different
places that I shoot in Manchester and where I could put it to get
shots of those areas. The kickstarter for the Pocket Three is
ending and shipping will begin this month in May of 2023.
So I'll drop a link in the description below this video and in the
pinned comment for you to go learn more about the Pocket Three and decide
whether or not you want to pick one up.