GoPro… Now What?
If you are reading this, either you bought a GoPro or are thinking of buying one. Its a pretty frustrating piece of equipment to use. A lot of people get hooked by GoPro’s awesome advertising of extreme sports and exceptional examples. The reality is, most of us don’t participate in extreme sports or have the ability to fly aircraft in formation with GoPros attached. That being said, you can make some pretty cool pictures or video of day to day life. Lets go over the good. The camera is nearly indestructible, small, has decent image quality, and its waterproof to some ridiculous depth. The downsides are its a pain to use, low light is basically a waste of time, and the battery life is crap. So your thinking now, I can put up with that! But don’t go buy one just yet. Your modern cell phone can also shoot 1080p video and take pretty good quality pictures. And on top of that, is a million times easier to use than the GoPro. You can even get waterproof cases for your cell phone for not too much. And the battery life would be way better on a cell phone as well. So is it really worth $300-$400 for something thats just a wider view, and waterproof? Maybe. It depends on how much you think you want that wide view and waterproof feature.
Example of the wide angle, great for big group shots. It even manages to balance out the bright outside with the darker car inside.
My buddy Nick, demonstrating that nice waterproof feature. They are great for action shots at the beach.
With a $30 suction cup mount, you can mount it in the window of your car or airplane and get great pictures of stuff while you concentrate on driving or flying.
With a clamp mount you can get interesting angles of everyday things like riding a bike
Another benefit of the GoPro’s size is you can tie it to a kite and get aerial shots with ease!
Fun pictures underwater are also easily had.
Something that all of these pictures have in common is that I took them with the time lapse mode. That way I can just start the camera and it will most likely get something over the course of a minute or so of activity. The downside is you have to sort through alot of pictures after. I usually set it up to take a picture every second. If I’m doing something thats harder to get a decent picture I’ll set it for every 0.5 seconds.
For this shot, it was in timelapse mode taking a picture every 0.5 seconds. I simply threw it in the air a few times and managed one picture.
For video, its a little different. People tend to get frustrated not because the camera, but because they dont have the know how to edit video or a computer powerful enough to do it. My interest is fairly limited, and mostly I just take short clips, throw some music over it, and then call it a day. Heres some examples of video I shot with the GoPro Hero 3+ Black edition.
Luckily my buddy Mike was going up for his spin endorsement to become a flight instructor and I suction cupped a gopro inside the airplane.
Heres an example of video right off the camera. Driving down a dirt road in Arizona. The GoPro suction cupped to my roof.
Lastly the timelapse feature actually being used to show a drawing I did in progress.
Hopefully these examples will help in your decision to buy or not buy or maybe just be a little more adventurous with your GoPro’ing. Thanks for reading!
Click HERE for the video editing tutorial!
