I’d been a good boy all year, and Santa had rewarded my virtue with a shiny new iPhone 4.
None of my old brick phones could record video like this thing could: 720p, 30fps, 48 kHz stereo audio. Glorious.
So when my cousin Tim and I went out to snipe some bunnies in the back paddock with our trusty .22s (a Christmas tradition), we tried recording a few kills through the scope. The footage was awful—impossible to focus, impossible to keep still.
Using the materials at hand (scraps of cardboard from the Christmas bon-bons box and some paddle-pop sticks), we forged a makeshift contraption to hold my iPhone firmly in place while we shot. The thing was ugly. It fell apart in twenty minutes. I got a splinter. But it worked—we played the footage of Tim nailing a hare from 200 metres until New Years Eve.
Skopecam was born.
TINKERING
If you’re reading this, you’re probably a hunter, and you know how determined and resourceful we can be.