Steller: Antietam

Mobile storytelling is something I've toyed with off and on for a few years. I do it with Instagram and Twitter, and they're great for immediacy and spot news. But I wanted something a bit more substantive, that allowed for more in-depth and coherent packages. A friend of mine drooped some knowledge on me and suggested I look at Steller. 

It's an iPhone app that let's you build short essays. Mixed media. Video, photos and text can be laid out to tell a longer story. 

Here's the link to my first story: https://steller.co/stories/323439049282946648

I finished up my first story tonight. It's a series of landscapes shot with Hipstamatic of the Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland. 

Layout was pretty simple. You can arrange pages, change fonts and even go back to change how a page looks. You can put in video. 

I'm still playing around with it but I like what I see. 

GoPro on a T72 tank. In Syria.

Just after finishing up some studying last night I checked into Petapixel and saw this crazy footage from Syria. Someone, I don't know who, mounted a GoPro camera on a Assad-regime T72 tank roaming around and blowing stuff up in a suburb of Damascus. 

It has this crazy Call of Duty look to it. A couple of times I had to remind myself it was actual combat footage, not a video game. Which probably goes to how much these types of games have flooded our society and become normal. 

This footage looks to be a mix of news, GoPro and rebel footage for a pretty compelling look at that three-year old civil war. It's a unique look at at the fighting over there, one that reminds me of the helmet cam and point-of-view footage shot by American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Civil War: Manassas Reenactment, July 2011.

A muzzle-loading cannon on the re-enactment field near Manassas, Va., July 23, 2011.

So I am now, finally, in the middle 2000s: I've started posting to Flickr. This is just a small sampling of what I think is a ton of material. 

These photos were from the re-enactment of the First Battle of Bull Run on July 23, 2011. All were shot on my Android phone with the Vignette app. They're just grabs as I was shooting video that day (bad video, I'll add).

Scroll them down below or hit the title and to see the rest of my photo stream.