I’ve found myself filming a lot on my iPhone and iPad and now the modern generations of iDevices film in 1080p HD a lot of space can get taken up very quickly. Sometimes it’s not always convenient to hook your iPad up to a laptop and download the footage using iPhoto.
A solution would be to get a wireless hard drive like the LaCie Fuel. This hard drive has only recently been released after being announced at CES 2014. I’ve been testing it out for about a week now.
A drummer I know brought in his Christmas present into the office and it blew me away. It was the Bose SoundLink Mini Bluetooth speaker. As soon as I saw and heard it, I knew I wanted one.
Being a musician, I rather shockingly don’t have any decent speakers through which to play music at home. I have a home theatre system and an okay bluetooth speaker by Blaupunkt, but neither of them truly cut it in terms of sound quality.
Recently, I posted a review of the RAVPower Luster 3000 mAh portable charger. This is a great charger for the commute to work as it’s light and easy to carry around. But what about longer trips where you want to charge more than one item multiple times?
You don’t always realise you need portable power, but as I use various bits of technology on extended visits it becomes quite cumbersome to take power supplies and there isn’t always somewhere handy to charge your device anyway. I had a small Pebble charger for my mobile, but its connectivity options were limited so I couldn’t charge my iPad with it.
I’ve been taking photos on a fairly regular basis since I got a half decent camera in about 2006. Since then, I upgraded to my first DSLR in late 2011 – a Canon 600D.
Whilst I’ve always been keen to take photos when I’m out and about, being bothered to go out and explore has always been an issue. I therefore ended up only using the camera about once a month or so, when an opportunity came to go somewhere interesting.
I live in the countryside and there are endless walks and interesting places to visit and photograph, but I’ve never taken the time to explore them properly. I think part of the issue is what I do with the photographs after I took them.
Recently however, I can’t stop taking photos. I can’t wait to go to the next place on my list and take some more shots and share them on my online gallery. There are two reasons for this sudden desire to take more photos again.
The first is the excellent redesign of Flickr. I love the way the photos are now displayed with and an endless scrolling gallery and thumbnails that support retina display devices. On these devices the galleries look stunning.
The second and most important factor however, is incorporating my iPad into my workflow. Since buying a lightning to SD card connection kit, I’ve used the iPad as my sole tool for editing and sharing my photos online. I find it so much easier and quicker than firing up the computer and having to sit at a desk. With the iPad, I can edit and upload wherever, whenever, even having the photos being uploaded within minutes of them being taken. Certain apps make things a lot more fun and easier too, such as Snapseed for editing the photos and using the iPhone/iPad app GeoTagr to geotag my photo’s exact location. Flickrstackr also allows me to upload my photos to Flickr, adding them to different galleries and organising them efficiently.
I’ll be off on a short holiday soon, knowing that the days of waiting to get home to edit and share my photos are long gone.
I think I’ll start blogging about some of the places I go to as well as some posts about my kit and the apps I use in my workflow. Taking photos has never been so much fun.
I’m currently standing in the middle of Kings Cross station in London, nearly two hours early for a workshop at the Guardian on mobile storymaking. I hate being late for things so I tend to arrive stupidly early and hang around. On the plus side, it looks like today is going to be the hottest day of the year so this near 2 hour long gap means I can walk to the Guardian offices round the corner at such a slow pace, I can avoid turning into an epic sweatball and arrive looking as good as an overweight man who’s hurtling towards his 30s can do.
Today’s workshop is about using mobile technology to tell a story. I guess from a blogging or journalism point of view, using apps like Vine, Storify and Audioboo can help writers and journalists provide stories on the fly, quickly recording or microblogging and getting stuff out there quicker than ever.
Matt Keil 