More real world testing of the GoPro

It’s in my nature to save things, I don’t know why. Even though the camera came with four adhesive mounts, I was still very hesitant to use one… well I did. I fixed one behind the mirror and it generates some brilliant, vibration free, point of view shots. Today we went on a picnic with Cassie’s parents. I ran the camera for about 30 minutes on 720p, 60fps in wide mode. The wide mode is stunning but it makes us look like we are driving very fast. Below is a shot in wide mode. You can see the fish-eye effect towards the outer edges with the bendy trees. But amazingly, you can even see the snorkel in the bottom right of the shot. Because the camera doesn’t have a preview or viewfinder, the footage is typically captures with a ‘I hope this looks ok’ attitude as it is just guesswork on these early days.

So only after getting home and reviewing the footage, I’ve decided ‘wide’ mode is too wide.
I know that the shot below is virtually unusable, you can see the difference in perspective if you use the bull bar as a relative measure. The camera is mounted at the exact same angle and position, yet the perspective is more ‘human eye’. I think the wide mode would be very useful if you wanted to capture traffic for evidence, but to capture a point of view, I think this mode may be better.

It’s taken years to slowly break the habit of ‘keeping things for special occasions’. We all do it. We have the good china we don’t use, along with the good cutlery. The good tools we save for good jobs and we leave the plastic screen protectors on things way too long. But the sad truth of it is, it all goes out of date. Either you grow out of it (heaven forbid using good clothes for having fun), it gets stolen or you don’t care about it any more.

You can’t take one lick of it with you, so stop living like

I get why we have this attitude. You only have to be poor for a day to appreciate the scarcity of things. I’m sure it comes from parents and their experiences (and those of their parents). I’m sure if you only got one meal a day, you would certainly keep the screen protector on something worth a hundred meals.

I do however think that some of the countries we will be travelling through will have a different take on it… but more on that later.