Using the gimble as a camera stabilizer

- I think I was 12 or 13 when Stanley Kubrick's The Shining came out. And I don't remember how I saw it. I guess my friends and I must have snuck into the theater or something, but we saw it, and... And it was very scary. But I think it's a measure of how nerdy I already was that as much as I remember those two creepy little girls, I also remember having my mind completely blown by those incredible Steadicam shots from behind Danny's big wheel as he raced down the hallway of the Overlook Hotel.

That ability to move a camera through space like that just had not been seen before. And, of course, Kubrick was using it to incredible effect, but it just really struck me. And then a bunch of blood poured out of an elevator or something, and I forgot about it. But I would not have imagined at that time, or even five years ago, that that level of camera technology would be available to an ordinary person for not much money. Thanks to modern, tiny little gimbals and tiny little cameras like the GoPro and other little action cams, it's now possible for you to do those same types of shots.

This week, on The Practicing Photographer, we're going to look at a Steadicam solution that you may already own. This is going to be a video tip this week, and I know this is normally a still photography series, but those two things are blurring so much. We're, all of us are shooting video now. Even if it's just to post things on social media sites. What's great is that those of us who are more casual videographers can now, thanks to this technology, do things that used to take tremendous amounts of practice or lots of training or lots of very expensive gear, and one of those is shooting very stable footage with the equivalent of a Steadicam.

I have here a DJI Phantom 4 drone. I use this for aerial still photography. But what's cool about it is it's got this gimbal built in that's holding the camera. I'm going to turn this on. What I want to show you this week is the idea that this actually makes a, (drone beeping) My! this makes a decent video camera to use for times when you want to shoot smooth, stabilized video footage. Watch what happens as I move the drone around. The camera stays perfectly still.

When up in the air this is critical for getting smooth video footage, and for having a decent viewfinder when you're shooting stills. But I can actually hold this and the controller and my viewfinder and move around, or in this case, someone else can, and capture incredibly smooth footage. You might have seen something like this in form of the DJI Osmo, which is a small, little handheld gimbal-mounted thing. You can also buy decent gimbals for holding your iPhone or your action cam. But if you already own a drone with a gimbal on it, there's no need to spend more money doing that. Yes, this is a little bit bulky and cumbersome.

Yes, it's a little bit strange to hold. But it's a lot easier than video cameras used to be to hold. So what can you do with this? You can shoot smooth tracking shots. You can shoot video from odd angles that would normally be different to get at all, let alone to get smoothly. The trick is you can't expect this to solve all of your problems for you. You've still got to be very careful. You've got to think about your movements. You've got to try to move smoothly, yourself. Hold the platform as steadily as possible. You've got to find the right way to hold this whole contraption and still get the shots you want, and you got to manage the motion of the gimbal.

The gimbal is going to be constantly trying to calculate what's parallel to the ground and that means that sometimes it might get tilted at odd angles. It takes a little bit of practice. Don't expect that you're just going to come out and suddenly get great shots with this thing. The other thing is you need to walk through your shots ahead of time. Plan them out, both for your own safety, so that you don't walk into the swimming pool, and to see what the gimbal does. Then it's just a matter of setting up your shot, choreographing your stuff, starting the camera rolling and trying to move the gimbal as smoothly as possibly through space, letting it even out all of your footsteps.

For going up stairs, up and down stairs, across rough terrain, again, capturing weird angles with beautiful tracking shots. This is a great solution that you may already own. So, if you have a drone with a gimbal and you've been eyeing something like the DJI Osmo. Don't go for that quite yet. Do some practice with your drone. See if you can get what you need with this technology and see if this is even a kind of thing you want before you go out and invest in a dedicated camera gimbal.