iPhone Videos

Videos taken with my favourite camera…

  • Drive-by: Yucca Forest

    Drive-by: Yucca Forest; video by Hamish Reid, soundtrack by Roxann Spikula.

    2016: deep in my fave Joshua tree forest (a forest I’ve been visiting for a couple of decades now), somewhere in Death Valley National Park.

    One of the few desert videos here that’s simply a celebration of the desert itself, in this case of a Joshua Tree (Yucca) forest in Death Valley National Park, a forest that’s a bit off the beaten track and that I try to visit every year. The video is made by the soundtrack, adapted from a piece by local musician (and friend) Roxann Spikula, who also drove my Subaru along the desert tracks here while I sat on top of it holding my iPhone taking the raw video footage with a little Ikan stabilizer (yes, it’s an iPhone video, and no, it wasn’t done with a drone).

    Austere musical Greenland meets warm spiky desert visuals.

    Go to video page…: Drive-by: Yucca Forest

  • Up And Down: North Berkeley BART Station

    Up And Down: North Berkeley BART Station, a video by Hamish Reid.

    2017: the daily experience of passing through North Berkeley BART station, captured on an iPhone.

    I took San Francisco Bay Area’s BART to work every day for a couple of decades (I still use it semi-regularly). The geometries, the colors, the movements, the crowding, the noise… it could be annoying and overwhelming, or intriguing and mesmerizing, and sometimes even relaxing (I’m like that), but it was always mechanical. So I used my iPhone over several months to furtively capture shaky little clips of the experience of going through a single station — North Berkeley — and recorded a bunch of found sounds in the station for the soundtrack as well. And yes, it was difficult finding times when the place wasn’t crowded — some of this was done at 6am.

    Go to video page…: Up And Down: North Berkeley BART Station

  • The Next Station Is Embarcadero

    The Next Station Is Embarcadero, a video by Hamish Reid.

    West Oakland, July 2024: a quick-and-dirty iPhone video morsel while I worked on other things.

    Just an iPhone pressed against the window of a BART train between West Oakland and Embarcadero (San Francisco) stations, with no particular intentions in mind. I lucked out with the weather (the cloudy sky and subdued high-saturation light in particular) and the unusually slow speed of the train… and the even more unusually clean(ish) window. I know the area shown in the video — an always-struggling uneasy mixture of industry and residential blocks — from decades of criss-crossing it on a bike and having friends and acquaintances in the neighbourhood (lately getting worried about gentrification even here, though).

    Go to video page…: The Next Station Is Embarcadero

  • One Minute Dream (Lone Star)

    One Minute Dream, video and soundtrack by Hamish Reid.

    West Oakland, September 2024. Another quick-and-dirty iPhone video morsel done while I worked on something else…

    Made from outtakes from the earlier Lone Star sessions, manipulated slightly, and reusing bits of old soundtrack work I’ve used elsewhere but thought sort of worked here as well. Intended to be one of many One Minute Dreams, I just haven’t got around to the others yet.

    Go to video page…: One Minute Dream (Lone Star)