Stabilising goals

The image above is a Facebook “Memory” that popped up today, as it does every year on this date. I blogged about the story behind it back in 2021, but what I didn’t talk about back then (or very often) is that the goal for that stabiliser is one that’s still not realised. I often wonder if it ever will be.

That stabiliser wasn’t exactly cheap, though less expensive than a good oue would’ve been, and that’s the reason I was so determined to get it working—and why I still haven’t given up on it. However, not being able to use it didn’t stop me from taking photos, many of which were to illustrate blog posts. None of them needed that stabiliser, of course.

In 2015, I started making some YouTube videos, and the stabiliser would’ve been handy for some of them. I might have eventually worked it out, but in October 2016 I stopped making any videos. I always intended to make more, but just never did.

At that time, I had plans to make a portable studio for the garage, and was researching lighting options. However, in February of 2017, we moved to the other end of Auckland, along the southern edge of the Manukau Harbour, and there was too much work to do to settle into the new house.

Even so, I continued making plans for a garage studio, and in March 2019 I refurbished some old worklights that I planned to use for photography and video lighting. Nigel and I used them to take photos for some stuff we were selling on NZ’s auction site, Trade Me.

Then, of course, all my plans stopped on September 20, 2019.

Once I was here in my current house, I started thinking about what I wanted to do, and I knew whatever it was, it would include all sorts of creative work. The various Covid lockdowns gave me plenty of time to work on ideas and plans, including for making videos again.

In October 2021, a couple months after I blogged about that Facebook “Memory”, I ordered some studio lights from a photography supply company in Auckland, along a light cube (basically a small collapsible cube used for taking photos of objects). I planned to use both for photos, and the lights (possibly?) for making videos. In the end, the only thing I’ve used them for (so far…) was—once again—to take photos of things I was selling on Trade Me.

In that same era, I also got a ring light, which are used for vlog-style videos, selfies, and video conferencing (I used it for the latter, a family night on Zoom during a Covid lockdown). More recently, I bought a rig to hold a cellphone, something that gives me two handles on either side of my phone, something that makes it more stable than holding the phone by itself using one hand—or even two. Since phones’ video recording includes image stabilisation, the rig gives me just enough stability to make the image appear as if it my phone was on a tripod—well, it did in my tests, anyway. The rig also has a tripod mount and can accept “cold shoe” camera lights (this means lights that don’t get power from a camera), and I bought a pair of battery-powered lights for it, and all of that was pretty inexpensive.

Meanwhile, I also shortened the length of my audio podcasts, trying to keep them to around 18 minutes or less. My idea was that if I could shorten the podcast episodes, I could record them as video to upload to my YouTube Channel, and also post the audio as I always have. The videos have never happened, obviously, but my audio podcast has become weekly, which I think happened in part because I started making them shorter.

All of this lighting and other filming gear was always about making videos again—in fact, that’s the only thing a stabiliser is used for (nearly all the other equipment I bought could be used for photography, too, or it was usable only for photos). I’d enjoyed making videos for the time I did, and I thought I’d like to see if I could get good at it.

More recently, it became obvious to me that what many people now perceive of as a “podcast” is in video format, not audio, and audio-only podcasts have become kind of a quaint relic in some ways. I watched various YouTubers to get a sense of how they did what they do, but I noticed that much of what they did was about “monetising” their channels, which allows them to make a living from YouTube, something that was never my goal (not the least because it would mean paying tax on the income to two countries, along with twice the compliance costs). As it happens, YouTube places ads in front of some of my videos right now, but I don’t get a single cent of that—YouTube gets all of the money (my Channel isn’t even eligible to be monetised at the moment). I think it’s funny how much time I spent entertaining the idea of trying to make money from my videos while YouTube already was—but just for Google, not for me!

I still have no idea whether I’ll resume making videos of any sort, but my equipment has been, and will continue to be, useful for photos. For me, right now, that’s enough. I guess there’s stability in that, too.