Lights, Camera, iPhone: iPhoneography for Travel Videos

by Jen Pollack Bianco on


Travel photos are great, but these days where viral video memes are the cultural norm a mere picture with the 900 pound Marlin you caught on vacation just doesn’t cut it anymore. When it’s all about the money shot, it’s time to shoot video. Thanks to cool new technology and iPhone apps, you can be on vacation and in the director’s chair at the same time.

There are apps that let you edit in the field (or stream) and slap it up on YouTube via your mobile device, all with the ease of a few finger swipes and a decent wifi connection. Just remember that your awesome iGadget has its limitations, particularly poor sound quality and a tendency for shakiness. So here’s a rundown on a few Apps that can help you turn your potentially boring travel movies into bite sized tasty morsels of travel porn.

High Tech, Lo-Fi: 8mm Vintage Camera

Hipsters know the best thing about cool new technology is how easy and fun it is to make things look old and crappy! 8mm is the video capture App that shows just how right they are. This app is excellent for recording video and adding that veneer of nostalgia with a selection of filters. It even lets you insert a well-timed film snag, a manufactured glitch that adds to the charm of the finished piece. There is even an 8mm HD for iPad version, should you have some “vintage” video from your old Flip or other camera that you want to spruce up. A bonus asset is that the 8mm App has one of the highest quality recorded sound capabilities out there (as good as it gets within iPhone limitations). If it’s windy or you find that you don’t need dialogue, just replace your original soundtrack with sound effects, or music from your iPod.Silent Film Director is an essential entry level app and not as old fashioned as it sounds. Its Pro mode has a user friendly interface and is perfect for assembling clips you’ve already shot and adding simple titles and a basic sound track. You can add or layer filters. Pimp your clip by altering the time line. Try speeding it up or slowing it down. You can also share/upload from within the App. Borrow Quentin Tarantino’s magic equation:

Cool imagery + hyperspeed+ ironic 70’s song = awesome


One key tip in making your iPhone videos: keep it short and sweet, 20 seconds or less. No one wants to watch your two-week vacation play out in real time. Avoid editing complex sequences (and alienating your travel buddies) with your phone. Think of iPhone travel films as video postcards, and aim for emotion and action over perfection.

Go ahead and pull out your iPhone and shoot. If you aren’t happy with what you got on the fly, you can always try to fix it in post. Rad apps like Cinema FXV can help you correct some exposure goofs and add cool special effects. That boring plane ride might be more interesting as a cartoon. This is the app that can make that happen.

Think that the jerky footage you shot is unusable? App it before you hit delete. Not to worry – that bumpy helicopter ride on an overcast day gets much more visually appealing once you slow it down and add the apps negative filter. You can put in titles and soundtrack together with user-friendly ReelDirector and you might discover you’re more talented than Michael Bay.

The downside to shooting on your lightweight iPhone is that it’s hard to keep it steady. If you’re a little shaky you may want to think about investing in a hands free mount . The flexible In Your Face Viewbase is a great option, or try the Joby Gorilla Mobile. These require a little more cash investment but are still a bargain compared to buying a serious video camera.

What if your vacation sucked? I don’t think there is an app for that. But you can learn from Indie Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez and add the fun in post-production. You may not have his visual effects team, but with a few good apps out there to play with, you can turn that endless wait for room service into a fun ode to Mary Pickford in your hotel bathrobe.

A Grand Tour of the American West

by Paul Brady on


I could see the end of my road trip, on the other side of the deserts of the American Southwest, the sun-parched stretch of near nothingness that conceals some of the country’s greatest natural wonders. So after leaving Spaceport America in New Mexico, I prepared for a ironman push to the West Coast, my ultimate destination Los Angeles. Along the way, I’d stop at the Four Corners and the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas and probably some dusty, God-forsaken gas station in the middle of a field of rock and scrub and little else. It was going to be a long drive but, weirdly, I was excited.

Traveling the American Road – Road Trip Destiny Made Manifest


I found the Four Corners, the intersection of Arizona and Colorado and New Mexico and Utah, down a short dusty road on Navajo land just outside Teec Nos Pos, Arizona. It is, inarguably, one of the most touristy places I’d seen on the entire trip: There’s next to nothing here but for some trinket stands and a photo op, standing or sitting a paved circular monument to geographic coincidence, the only place in the country where visitors can touch four states at once.

Which isn’t to say people weren’t enjoying it. A group of Italians were riding on each others’ shoulders, getting unique angles for their pictures. A couple was visiting with her parents, each standing in a different state. Young kids were by turns bashful and brash, forced into photos their parents will one day look back on fondly only to be disappointed when the then-teenagers deny any recollection of the time the family went to the Four Corners.

As I walked back to the car, another group of Italians was having a loud conversation when one woman’s cell phone rang. “Pronto?” she asked as she answered, taking a call from the homeland as she photographed her friends standing on the spot we all came to see.

At the Grand Canyon, I worried that I’d find more of the same, a promise of greatness tempered by an ultimately disappointing monument. How wrong I was: Seeing the striated canyon formed by the Colorado river was a multi-layered pleasure, unfolding as I took in the views from the South Rim, stopping at turnouts along the road to take panoramas while standing on the roof of my SUV. One woman asked me to snap a photo for her, as long as I was up there.

The canyon changed not just in space but in time too, as I watched the sunset turn the rocks deeper and deeper hues of orange. As the shadows lengthened, the gorges in the distance turned purple and blue and finally black. Cameras lined the canyon rim, but I was happy to simply enjoy the sunset, trying to mentally catalog all the colors rather than capture them with my SLR. After nine weeks on the road, furiously photographing my trip, it was a luxury to simply enjoy the view.

In the morning, after the haze had burned off, I struck camp and set out for Las Vegas, the final waypoint before the end of my journey. But I was more interested in a nearby sight than any neon magic on The Strip: The Hoover Dam, a man-made wonder from an era of economic uncertainty financed by massive public spending. The art deco masterpiece is less than an hour from the biggest casinos in Las Vegas, but it’s also a four-hour haul through the Arizona desert.

There’s little to see until you speed across the Mike O’Callaghan – Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, when the canyon walls fall away and reveal the concrete monolith. Though walking across the top of the dam is quite pleasant, I prefer the view from the bridge, opened in October 2010 as a traffic bypass. A pedestrian-friendly walkway along its north edge provides a fantastic platform for photography–and contemplation of what extraordinary taxpayer spending and sacrifice can accomplish.

Video of the Day – Through the Alps

by Stephen Greenwood on

The Alps. Stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany and France in the west, it is one of the greatest mountain ranges in Europe and arguably the greatest range to navigate by car (or motorcycle) in the world.

Today’s Video of the Day captures one man’s motorcycle trip through Austria, Italy, Switzerland, & France along routes such as the Stelvio, the Silvretta, and the Grossglockner; all of which are extremely impressive feats of construction & maintenance. While there isn’t any description or storytelling, it’s a great way to experience the sights and sounds of the Alps.

Have you captured an amazing road adventure? We want to see it too! Share your videos with us in the comments below, or upload photos to our Flickr pool and it could be the next Photo/Video of the Day.

Ukranian teens capture illegal bridge climbing on video

by Kraig Becker on

I’ve seen some crazy urban climbing videos in my time, but this one takes the cake. It was captured on a helmet cam and follows four teenagers as they scramble up the Moskovskyi (Moscow) Bridge in Kiev, while traffic rushes by below. After a brief conversation in Russian at the beginning of the video, the teens simply begin scaling the steel cables that hold the bridge in place, without the use of any kind of climbing gear or safety equipment. Eventually they reach the top, and even climb inside the main tower, which stands some 377-feet in height.

Judging from the final shots of the video, I don’t know what would be scarier. Climbing the bridge, or making your way back down.


Amazing photographic animation of Cassini’s Saturn flyby

by Sean McLachlan on


The Cassini unmanned probe to Saturn has been a resounding success. A joint project between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency, it’s been studying the ringed planet since 2004. Cassini has been sending back detailed images of Saturn, its rings, and its moons and expanding our knowledge of the solar system.

Check out this amazing video made up of hundreds of thousands of Cassini photographs put one after another to recreate the flyby. There’s no CGI, no trick photography, these are all real images that, as the folks over at Tecca point out, are every bit as good as anything Hollywood can create us. This film is actually a preview of an IMAX feature currently under production by the nonprofit Outside In.

Before it got to Saturn, Cassini also flew past Venus, an asteroid, and Jupiter. I’m hoping those images will be in the movie too.

While I’m not going to be putting on my backpack and heading to Saturn anytime soon, images like this get me in the mood to travel. It’s that sense of exploration, learning about the unknown, that drives us to reach into space and see what’s out there. Cassini may be just an unmanned probe, but through the images it sends back we can all travel with it.