Macenstein

Anyone with kids old enough to require that you show up at some sort of recital or school concert knows that it is nearly impossible to get decent video of that event. In the old days, the parents who cared would actually bring a video camera to the event. Only 1/3 of those parents knew how to properly adjust that camera to meet the challenging lighting conditions, but at least they could zoom in on little Johnny or Becky Sue. Cut to 1 year ago, and now at least one mom or dad in each couple was holding up their cell phone to capture the moment, in all its blurry, over exposed, digitally-zoomed-in, shot-from-the-back-of-the-room glory.

But more and more, those of us forced to sit through 2 hours of other people’s kids flailing about so we can get to the 2 minutes of OUR kids doing something truly amazing have something NEW to be angered by – the assholes who hold up iPads to video the event. Yes, these idiots have no problem blocking our views, and blinding the 10 rows behind them as they attempt to pinch and zoom and video their kids using the most unergonomic videoing device ever.

Everyone in the auditorium could see what that idiot was filming, and the quality looked horrible. More often than not they would be holding the iPad above their head, shooting blindly, while also blinding the rest of us. I could only shake my head at these nut bars who were clearly (I thought) using their iPads incorrectly.

But today when visiting the Apple website, I see that Apple has now come to realize these idiots apparently account for a large part of their iPad sales, and they are now showing people videoing events with their iPads. They show legitimate filmmakers walking around with their iPads, which now serve as a replacement for that “finger tv frame”-thing that scarf-wearing directors used to walk around doing to frame out shots in shows like the Brady Bunch.

The future looks dim for those of us who will be sitting behind these people at all future kid events, much dimmer than their iPads. So here’s hoping one of Apple’s new features in iOS 8 is a new “don’t blind the people behind you” feature to the iPad’s camera app, one that will shrink down the preview window to a sub-iPhone size. These bright iPad screens are making it difficult for the rest of us to sleep through these performances.