- Image © by Brian E. Faulkner - The beach has changed. It’s no longer the laid back experience of old, when the biggest bother might be a tad too much sun or a spray of sand assaulting your sticky skin as a pack of kids flies by unaware that they’re not being all that neighborly in their exuberance.
But now there’s something else to watch out for, because the stretch of territory between the ocean and the dunes has become the hunting ground for squads of smart phone cameras, which now seem to nearly outnumber the soaring Frisbees and colorful kites that used to skim over the sand. To say they’re everywhere is an under-statement.
Of course, cameras have always been part of the beach experience, but not to today’s extent, thanks to ever richer, ever cheaper technologies. The latest entertaining innovation is the selfie stick, which just may be the most personally captivating invention since the looking glass, providing all manners of opportunity to add one’s own image to creative backgrounds. Those backgrounds, of course, may contain people who who’d rather bury their heads in the sand than appear on Instagram or Facebook while attempting to mount a boogie board designed for someone 30-40 years younger. But it’s hard to escape the ubiquitous video eye, which gazes on the lovely and the unlovely with equanimity.
A marketing writer complained in a MediaPost piece just yesterday about how predictable (even boring) that GoPro promotional footage videos have become, with their seemingly endless clips of personal excess, cutting from “one act of extreme bravado to the next.”
So what else should you expect from a GoPro promo? Footage of moms, dads, kids and relatives having fun at a family picnic? Fact is, we’ll be able to enjoy more images like that soon enough, thanks to GoPro’s new mini-cam aimed at the family market – complete with a viewing screen.
But now there’s something else to watch out for, because the stretch of territory between the ocean and the dunes has become the hunting ground for squads of smart phone cameras, which now seem to nearly outnumber the soaring Frisbees and colorful kites that used to skim over the sand. To say they’re everywhere is an under-statement.
Of course, cameras have always been part of the beach experience, but not to today’s extent, thanks to ever richer, ever cheaper technologies. The latest entertaining innovation is the selfie stick, which just may be the most personally captivating invention since the looking glass, providing all manners of opportunity to add one’s own image to creative backgrounds. Those backgrounds, of course, may contain people who who’d rather bury their heads in the sand than appear on Instagram or Facebook while attempting to mount a boogie board designed for someone 30-40 years younger. But it’s hard to escape the ubiquitous video eye, which gazes on the lovely and the unlovely with equanimity.
A marketing writer complained in a MediaPost piece just yesterday about how predictable (even boring) that GoPro promotional footage videos have become, with their seemingly endless clips of personal excess, cutting from “one act of extreme bravado to the next.”
So what else should you expect from a GoPro promo? Footage of moms, dads, kids and relatives having fun at a family picnic? Fact is, we’ll be able to enjoy more images like that soon enough, thanks to GoPro’s new mini-cam aimed at the family market – complete with a viewing screen.
- Drawing by Kate Faulkner - GoPro is one thing, but I don’t cotton much to the phone-as-camera excess, even though I have shot many pictures at the beach myself -- and most everywhere else, including all sorts of family events. But I feel less inclined to shoot beach pics these days because everyone else is doing it (launch crappy attitude alert!). Could it be that I’ve been the unwilling subject of too many phone-based candid shots? Could it be the time (this week!) that one of my sons-law shot some slo-mo footage of my toothy old man laugh and then played it back to the crowd assembled during our beach reunion, resulting in chuckles all around except from me? Well, maybe …
So it could be about time to acquire an iPhone of my own and vault full bore into Video Nation. Then I could sneak up on that crafty son-in-law of mine and catch him laughing—which would serve him right.
His cackle sounds just like a hyena.
TakeAway: Like it or not, video is everywhere these days.
Content © by Brian E. Faulkner
So it could be about time to acquire an iPhone of my own and vault full bore into Video Nation. Then I could sneak up on that crafty son-in-law of mine and catch him laughing—which would serve him right.
His cackle sounds just like a hyena.
TakeAway: Like it or not, video is everywhere these days.
Content © by Brian E. Faulkner
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