I spent the first weekend with my new iPhone 6+ trying out the timelapse, slow motion and hyper lapse functions of the phone in the beautiful Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. I’m an owner at a video production company in Portland, OR; and as someone who uses a camera in all sorts of ways about 6 days a week- playing with the iPhone 6+ made me feel like an 6 yr old with a magic toy. The ease of use paired with very powerful in-phone functions is so well knit together that it feels like cheating going from shooting 240 fps to timelapse to stabilized video so easily. I was running around shooting like I just got my first camera.
Is the iPhone 6+ amazing? YES. Would I bring it to a job shooting for a client? No. It will shoot 240fps, but it degrades and is not what you’d want full size in a polished video. The in-camera stabilizer in the Instagram Hyperlapse app is AMAZING, but it exports final video in 720 not 1080. Timelapse looks great when the conditions are stable, but changing light has the phone struggling to smoothly change exposures following the light. So yes, it’s jaw-dropping awesome what’s packed in this big phone, and we will probably see some amazing footage and videos shot soley on the new iPhones, but I don’t feel a threat to my job security….yet. The quality needed for professional work is not there…. yet. Rather than a threat, I think this will be an asset to the industry to inspire and find those in our populations that should be behind a high-end camera making beautiful work.
If you’re a professional shooter and feeling a bit burnt out on the demands of always producing content, meeting demands of a client, and fulfilling the taxing demands of high end production- a weekend in a beautiful place with friends and the iPhone 6+ in your pocket (or purse/murse if pockets are not jumbo sized) might be the ticket to re-sparking that joy of shooting. This thing is just so much damn fun.
