An old friend recently pointed out to me a rather cool camera called the GoPro Hero 3, I have been wanting something to take better and more stable videos now I’m going out (I was getting complaints about people getting seasick watching my phone ones), so this seemed ideal. After a very little amount of persuasion from my friends I went ahead and ordered it.
I won’t go into great detail about the camera, it’s easy enough to look up on the website, it’s very lightweight, robust, weatherproof, has a remote control (smartphones can also control it with a free app) and comes with several clamps and mounts, basically ideal for attaching to my wheelchair and allowing me to actually take photos and videos myself (controlling a normal camera or camera-phone isn’t really possible for me).
First of all here are some still shots, the first is straight from the camera, you can see there’s a fair bit of distortion from the wide angle lens, it’s easy to fix using photoshop (which has a profile available for GoPro cameras) or another photo editing program. With about 2 minutes of time you can get great quality photos like the others below.
Of course I was desperate to take the camera out for a play so a walk in the park was on the agenda. I decided to leave the camera on standard settings for my first test, and just got my PA to attach it to my chest belt, I’ll try attaching it to the chair and alter the settings next time.
In the video below you can see the iPhone app running (fixed on my tray using a car windshield phone holder), the app does drain the battery fairly quickly and the phone ran out of power before the camera. The video is slightly processed as I had to recompress it for YouTube, the original size was over 16GB, it does look amazing so well worth the size really. It was also a rather good test of my Frontier X5 power chair, the terrain wasn’t exactly smooth but the chair handled it with no problem, my neck was more of a limiting factor, surprised I didn’t get whiplash!
Overall it’s an amazing camera and I can’t wait to use it again, I need to move my phone though as I couldn’t reach to control the camera properly, maybe a stylus would help. Also next time I’ll get the camera fixed to the chair itself, looking forward to making lots more videos to bore everyone 😉
P.S. – For editing I used Avidemux, it’s free and simple to use but no fancy effects.
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