In preparation for a series of short documentaries I’m going to shoot in Cape Town in August I have been doing some test shoots with a tiny (40g) action camera that attaches magnetically to a pendant worn under your clothes. My intention is that it is small enough not to draw attention like an actual camera but big enough that it isn’t as unnerving as cameras hidden in your glasses.
One of the benefits of mounting a camera on your chest rather than on your head is that the image points in the direction of overall bodily motion, ie. when I pause look left and right when crossing the road the camera doesn’t look left and right too. I think this is both calmer and more suited to my intentions.
Image stabilisation is achieved by shooting wide angle and at 2.7k (or 4k) and using postproduction software that crops and rotates the image to remove much of the jiggle introduced by walking before outputting at a lower resolution (in this case 1080p). It doesn’t completely remove the bob of walking, but the result is much more watchable than unstabilised footage.
Despite my mild anxiety about wearing a camera, at the games expo I saw about three people wearing the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, so now I’m wondering if I backed Betamax instead of VHS in the inconspicuous camera stakes.
