I’m writing this newsletter at 6am in Shenzhen, China. I have no idea what time or day it is in the UK and, therefore, can only apologise for my tardiness in getting it over to you this week.
Although, actually, now I look at the world clock on my phone, I’ve realised I’m ahead of the curve with this one.
Brilliant. Check me out.
We are reaching what appears to be yet another Silly Season in tech journalism, where brands from across the globe decide to release new products and ship YouTubers, journalists, and PR people around the world to see those products in action.
This trip has been, without question, the biggest one for me so far - but it has also made me realise something I already knew about doing this for a living.
Embarrassingly, it’s something I’ve often made a point of telling you guys, too.
My trip to China has been relatively fleeting, given the distance involved. We arrived bleary-eyed, smelly, and ready for a very delayed bedtime on Tuesday. Or was it Wednesday? I genuinely have no idea. As I write, it’s definitely Friday, and we have just today and tomorrow to finish our work here and spend some free time exploring Hong Kong before heading back to the UK.
With me, I have a suitcase full of clothing and footwear I’m clearly not going to use, and a rucksack packed to the brim with a huge amount of gear; the laptop on which I’m writing this newsletter; loads of cables, chargers, and adaptors; a carbon fibre tripod; the DJI Mics; a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Oh, and a Sony ZV-E1 camera with a great big 24-70mm lens strapped to it.
As you’d imagine, this tech bag is rather heavy - mainly because of that camera system. Guess what - I’ve not unearthed that camera from its slumber. Once. And it looks like I won’t be doing so for the rest of the trip.
This means two things: firstly, bringing the Sony camera and the accompanying tripod was a complete waste of time.
Secondly, I should have known better.
Since arriving, we’ve been shown all manner of weird and wonderful things by Huawei. Their drop-dead gorgeous R&D centre, the brilliantly fun Health Lab, and the utterly mind-blowing European Village. There have been numerous opportunities to capture stunning footage of these surroundings and of the devices I’m actually here to check out and review. All of that footage, without question, has been shot on my S24 Ultra and a Huawei device I’m not allowed to talk about at the time of writing.
I’ve also been filming a couple of vlogs for my creator YouTube channel. Those have been shot exclusively on the tiny DJI Osmo Action 4 camera.
I didn’t need to bring the Sony ZV-E1 or that stupidly heavy lens. Using it over the last couple of days would have resulted in me faffing about far more with settings than I did with the phones, and would have left me with footage that needed far more work to make ready for public consumption, compared to what the phones spit out.
We live in a blissfully simple world for video content creation today. Ironically, I was chatting to a fellow YouTuber last night over dinner about the fact we have, gradually, given up caring about some of the minutiae that used to dominate our production processes. Spending loads of money on audio gear, toiling with multiple colour grade passes, and agonising over every little edit point, are just some of the things that we’ve realised our audiences don’t care about (some do, of course - but they’re in the minority). Taking big cameras on trips like this should be dealt with in that same mindset, too. It slows you down, complicates things, and takes you away from the joy of capturing what matters.
The moral of the story today is, therefore, a simple one. If you’re a content creator and you’re travelling for work, don’t take that big camera. Just shoot with your smartphone. I’ll be doing that from now on.
I think.