Another week of sunshine
I am a little late getting Week 2 of April’s update out. Last week was another of wall to wall sunshine and continued on the previous weeks trend of being a bumper week in complete contrast to this time last year! Unfortunately it has also been a rather heavy week on the old expenses as I have really gone to town with some upgrades and purchases over the past fortnight or so in preparation for some new work!
So far we have added a:
DJI Ronin 4 gimbal
Nikon 14-24 f2.8S
Nikon 24-120 f4.0 S
DJI Avata 2 drone
Blackmagic Davinci Studio
There are more plans afoot beyond this - the new DJI Mavic 4 drone when that appears is probably top of the list… the rumoured Nikon Z camera oriented towards filming rather than stills which is possibly going to appear towards the end of 2025 is in the mix. The DJI Mini 5 is probably a sure fire purchase too when that arrives as if it enhances image and video quality over the Mini 3 (which isn’t great… but the 4 isn’t much better) then it will be an absolute godsend for urban work!
As you can probably tell from the above I am starting to make a move towards more video rather than just stills. Why? I think it’s going to become ever more popular a feature amongst both my existing clients and potential new ones. Still images I think will be eroded by AI faster, and we are also seeing a real boost in internet speeds both through the growth of 5G and through the adoption of fibre to premises technologies… even Starlink and it’s ilk are penetrating the more rural markets to provide much faster speeds that allow for better streaming (this is where we currently are, but fibre is due to arrive at our doorstep later this year/early next). This is something I am working on more, and I am looking into furthering my education in such areas too, whether that is a full University level course or a series of shorter courses I am not yet sure… but I think that this is a parallel path to the photography that I need to be looking at and learning more about!
So… we are going to be adding a mashup of my videography to my weekly updates (if I remember!) starting this week!
Most of my work at present is really social media output for attention grabbers rather than fully polished showcase videography (which I do as well, but that comes by less often… you will know it when you see it though!) so the quality is a bit more “throw away” rather than “high quality” but it is interesting to watch how even these “quick and dirty” videos improve over time… and since I don’t tend to archive these on my own systems I am putting them up onto You Tube so I can compare and contrast over time! I am also not bothering to save them in 4k as the uploads take forever over satellite - that is reserved for showcase pieces!
Anyway - here is a gallery of this weeks stills:
And my video mash up is here:
Next week is a short one as we run up to the Easter weekend, but it is already looking pretty reasonable (last year I had no jobs over the school holidays… so this is really looking up after the very slow start to 2025!)
