Turn up the sound on your computer and listen to this video.

Yes, I meant listen. You don’t need to hear the whole thing—it’s two minutes—to grasp that the audio quality is surprisingly good. It was recorded with my smart phone—an iPhone, actually—without any extraneous recording device. What you hear is unedited straight out of an iPhone. I think it’s amazing.

Perhaps the most overlooked feature on anyone’s smartphone—and it’s a powerful one—is the microphone.

It represents an incredible opportunity to preserve yet another dimension of the people we love, but you need to know what you’re doing to take full advantage of it.

The reason this sounds so good is because I followed:

THE CARDINAL RULE OF AUDIO RECORDING

PUT YOUR MICROPHONE AS CLOSE TO THE SOURCE OF THE SOUND AS POSSIBLE.

In this case, the camera was about fifteen inches from Teddy’s face, or more importantly, his mouth.

The story Teddy is telling is really insignificant here. I just want you to listen to the sound quality. If the microphone had been father away—even five feet—it would sound like what most people have come to expect from home videos; a little muffled, a little distant, a little amateurish. But with the microphone so close to the source, it immediately takes you into Teddy’s world; what it’s like to be Teddy and what it’s like to be with Teddy. (If you’re really curious about the story, Fruitless Mountain happily becomes Blossom Mountain in the end. The sky is full of dragons.)

We were also in a totally quiet room for the recording. There was no fan or air conditioner noise or traffic or lawnmower sound coming in an open window. It was a really quiet house just before bedtime and we were sitting on a bed which, acoustically speaking, is a pretty darn good place to record sound. In the parlance of audio engineers the sound is clean.

I realize that our website is dedicated to still photography, but every once in a while it’s nice to put some sound with the faces. Grabbing an occasional short little video with good sound of the people you love—especially children—will bring tears to your eyes in only a few years.

 

Here are some things to keep in mind when you do this at home.

• Hold the smartphone about a foot or two from the subject’s face. The closer the better.
• Teddy is distracted. He’s telling the story to his mother who is off camera. He’s lost in the story, seemingly unaware of the camera.
• Sit on a bed; the blankets and pillow eliminate echos and produce an audio-friendly recording space.
• The clip is short. It doesn’t take much to have impact and short videos are MUCH easier to store and share.
• Wait till the house if totally quiet. Turn off all fans and air conditioners. Close the windows if there’s any sound coming in.
• Remember that the picture is secondary; the sound carries the day here. Obviously, the two of them together produce a wonderful third effect, but the picture alone is not much to write home about. Preserve that vanishing voice.

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