Oh the Places We Go with GoPro!

We've traveled the world for our clients to shoot some fantastic high-quality footage and still photography.  Most of our work involves the larger professional HD cameras and DSLRs for still photography.  In the last few years though, there’s another camera that’s enabled us to add a whole new perspective as a second or third camera on our shoots, the GoPro Hero.

GoPro is a consumer camera marketed to extreme sport enthusiasts – biking, surfing, snowboarding, just about anything that you want to record to show your friends the “gotta see to believe it.”  But if you’ve watched any reality programming, especially competition type shows, you've probably seen a GoPro strapped to the helmet of someone rappelling down a building or tucked in the dash of a car.  The camera is small, versatile and can be mounted nearly anywhere thanks to the numerous mounts, straps and housings GoPro offers.  And the wide angle HD image is pretty impressive for a camera that size.

We've found it to be effective to provide a different angle for all the transportation work we've done.  We mounted it to hoods of trucks going 60-70 mph, locomotives, trains, helicopters, big rigs, and even cheerleaders.  It’s a great tool to get a shot that would be too dangerous for a human to do with our typical camera set up.  We’re looking forward to mounting it to some watercraft this summer to really test that waterproof housing.  

Now that Go Pro is WiFi enabled there’s an app for that.  You can preview your shot on your iPad or iPhone and even control the start and stop of recording.  That feature was really helpful when we mounted the camera on the hood of the truck and used the speed of the car to track the shot.  It’s fun to experiment to see what will and won’t work in the context of the edit.  The camera we mounted to the tumbling cheerleader didn't work nearly as well as the ceiling mounted GoPro once we saw it in the edit suite.  Perspective is everything in the final product.