Next week I’m off travelling and I couldn’t feel more ready

When I picked up my iPhone 17 Pro Max a few months back, I had no idea quite what effect it would have on me.

You could fairly argue that the phone itself hasn’t changed all that much from year-on-year, but somehow this year I seem to have embraced what it can do for me.

In short, I’m hooked on getting the most I can from the 17 Pro Max cameras and letting it take me to new levels of creativity.

If you’ve been reading my stories over the past few months, you’ll know I’ve been busy running all over the country making content with the 17 Pro Max being pretty pivotal to it all. It’s so competent that I knew, if I took the time to learn better how to use it properly, it could be an amazing key to unlocking a new me—and it has!

Edinburgh bound

Quietly behind the scenes, I’ve spent the last few months learning about what it takes to make content on the fly. Every trip has taught me something. From the mistakes I’ve made, I’ve learned what not to do, what procedures work for me and what kit I need to pack.

When you watch videos from the likes of Peter McKinnon or Matti Haapoja, it looks so effortless, but like anything, it’s not until you try it out, you start to realise that it’s not as easy as it looks. Apart from all the technical bits, there is the art of feeling comfortable talking to a camera in front of people as you walk down the street. Trust me, that one takes some getting used to!

Until recently, I was a stay-at-home creator who had no interest in shooting content away from the safety of my studio. But after buying the 17 Pro Max and realising how I was seriously underusing it, a voice started to nag away at me. It was telling me to do more.

I heard it and grabbed the opportunity!

So, from a lad that used to revel staying in his studio, my calendar next week looks like this;

• Sunday, I’m in London shooting pictures around the West End
• Monday, I’m visiting the Sky Garden for a photo shoot
• Tuesday, I fly to Edinburgh (I’ve never been)
• Wednesday, I’ll spend all day filming there
• Thursday afternoon, I fly home after a final morning of shooting
• Friday, I’ll record the podcast back in my studio
  

Part of me thinks I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, but the other part of me knows I can do this. And an even bigger part of me knows I want to do this!

I know I’m ready.

iPhone 17 Pro Max – are you ready

And at the heart of all this will be my 17 Pro Max.

Kitting that out for travel and vlog-style videos has taken me some time, but I think I’ve got it nailed now. I’ll be taking four lenses with me – a 110° wide-angle lens, a 2x for the main camera, a 2x tele lens for the 17 Pro Max tele lens and the latest addition – an anamorphic lens. I’ll also have two ND filters and a black mist filter with me as well. I’ll come back to the ND filters in a bit, as they’ve been critical in unlocking the iPhone’s potential.

I’ve added a decent gimbal and a travel-friendly tripod, a cage and a small LED light to my gear, too. The LED light sounds fairly inconsequential, but it means I can shoot at night in hotel rooms or Airbnbs.

All of this kit now sits in one tightly packed camera bag, which I can pick up at a moment’s notice and be out the door. I’m hoping I can take it on the plane next week with no hassle – I think I’ll be ok, but again, this is part of my staged plan.

This will be the first time I’ve flown with my kit, so I’ll learn the loopholes. After this, I hope the next trip will be somewhere in Europe. I’ve had that in mind for a time now, but I needed to take some baby steps before jumping in at the deep end.

So the gear is good to go – but what about me? What tricks have I learned over the past few months of travelling?

Those ND filters and more

I mentioned that starting to use these filters had been the catalyst for unlocking the potential of recording high-quality video with the 17 Pro Max – here’s why.

The native video camera is more than good enough for family and personal use, but it doesn’t really cut it when it comes to more professional work. I want to shoot in the Apple ProRes CODEC and in the Apple Log 2 colour space. I also wanted to use the Blackmagic app as I know that what the pros use and even Apple use to record their events with. I even seem to recall that Danny Boyle shot 28 Years Later with it.

Yet until recently, I had no confidence in it, as every time I tried to shoot outdoors, everything was overexposed and blown out. Even if I tried to drop the ISO or increase the shutter speed, I had no joy. But simply by popping on a 1.5-5 ND filter immediately, everything changed. Now I’ve found that part of the jigsaw puzzle, suddenly I’m able to record beautiful video, anywhere, in any conditions, and I’m in total control.

I can’t get enough of the Blackmagic app, and over the past few days, I’ve been living in it, which helped me stumble across something else that was new to me, which is essentially aperture priority mode.

Explaining aperture priority mode

There is no direct setting in Blackmagic to enable this mode; there’s no single button to press, rather, it’s a case of understanding how the iPhone 17 Pro Max performs at its best and then using the right settings in the app to record at the highest quality.

Aperture priority is nothing new in the world of cameras, but until I waded through reeds of websites recently, I didn’t know that was how the iPhone wants to record. In layman’s terms, your iPhone likes to record multiple videos at different exposures and then blend them together to give the best quality single video file it can deliver.

That’s just how it works. And to get Blackmagic to record that way, there are a few simple things you have to do.

Basically, it involves giving up the manual control we all crave and going into auto mode – it hurts the pride, but the results are worth it. So, here’s what you need to do.

For reference, the settings I used in London last week were AppleProRes 422 HQ, 4K and Apple Log 2. I chose ProRes 422 and not ProRes Raw as that CODEC has no stabilisation. And I chose Apple Log 2 as it offers me more flexibility in post.

In the camera view, tap on the +/- icon in the sidebar and then the blue ‘auto’ button that you’ll see appear. Once the ISO is in auto, so too will the shutter speed. In this auto mode, if you move your iPhone around, you’ll see the shutter speed and ISO changing as the light and conditions vary. It’s fascinating to watch it in action! I still manually set the white balance, but once I’m happy with it, I lock it down as I don’t want that to drift.

The next time you want to try recording in log on your 17 Pro or Pro Max, give this aperture priority method a go. I’ve been massively impressed with the results.

It’s worth noting, though, that in the studio, under controlled lighting, I stick in manual mode. So for me, that’s 24fps, and I lock the shutter to 1/48th. I then manually set the ISO to around 800, and the white balance is locked at 4250.

Ready for the next chapter

Clearly, it’s not just the 17 Pro Max that has brought me to this point – I wanted change, but it was sure as hell the iPhone that urged me to believe I could do it and had the equipment to hand to do it.

All these little tips I’ve been learning over the past few months have led to next week and my trip to Edinburgh. I feel apprehensive but excited at the same time. It’s a tiny step for some, but a pretty big leap for me.

Apart from the camera bag, I have also decided on what Apple gear I’ll be taking – and a couple of those choices are surprising. I’m going to take my chunkiest Mac – the 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro, as I know it can handle the video CODECS I’ll be shooting in.

When I visited Bath, I took my MacBook Air, but that struggled and jittered. My plan this time, and another trick I’ve learnt, is each evening to assemble a rough timeline in Final Cut of that day’s work so that I know I have the footage I need.

Once back, I’ll have no opportunity to re-shoot.

I’ll take the iPad mini to act as a monitor for Blackmagic when I’m recording a-roll in the apartment, and I’ll also take the iPhone Air with me. I’ve found that’s perfect for keeping in my pocket to look at script points as I’m walking down the street vlogging.

One of my biggest challenges next week will be getting any content uploaded. I’m going to try and write while I’m there, and I hope to at least have a basic edit made of the video before leaving, but when I’ll get a chance to tidy both the story and the video up, well, that isn’t so clear.

So, the next time you’ll hear from me will be post my trip. If you’d told me six months ago this is what I’d be craving for, I’d have doubted your sanity. Yet here we are – Tuesday morning, I’ll be at Heathrow, with my 17 Pro Max packed, waiting for the next part of this story to unfold.