GoPro Hero3 Review

I borrowed my son's GoPro Hero3 Silver Edition to take out on the SUP with me.  I see so many great things while I'm paddling up and down the coast, but the sightings are fleeting and always unexpected.  There's never time to stop paddling, get a camera out, point it in the right direction and click the shutter.  Trust me, I've tried.  So, I thought, if I just have the camera strapped to me and on all the time, it will see what I see and voila! I can share those awesome sightings with my family and the world.

So, I purchased a Chesty mount, charged the battery and inserted the 8 GB memory card. It takes mini SD.  I have larger capacity cards, but they are all regular SD, so I had to use the one that Alex supplied for me with the camera.  In spite of warnings that the battery doesn't last long, I ran out of room on the SD card long before the battery ran out, so I would recommend investing in at least a 16 GB card just to match the battery life.

Camera securely strapped across my bosom, I headed out through the surf.  It was a warm, clear, calm day, and the ocean was unbelievably full of dolphins.  The moment I stood up on my board, I caught sight of a graceful silhouette arcing out of the water and splashing down just a couple hundred yards offshore.  I started paddling my little heart out.

As I paddled, I saw that the jumping dolphin was not alone.  He was a member of what appeared to be a very large pod, or maybe even a super pod, that was migrating north parallel to the shore.  I struggled to try to get close, and at one point found myself in a position where I could see dolphin in every direction.  I paddled along their path, hoping they would think me to be one of their own and come to say hello.  No one got quite that close, but I was able to see, from a distance, a cluster of five or six dolphin taking turns jumping out of the water ahead of me as I made my way northward.

And then there was the turtle.  A yellow spot, floating in the water.  When it raised its head at my approach, I was certain what it was, and I was able to get close enough to see its eye and the barnacles on its back.  The camera was facing the same direction I was, so I just crossed my fingers and hoped that it was seeing the same things that I was.

I was utterly disappointed.  Don't get me wrong, the footage is awesome and made for a fun little video, but of the literally dozens of dolphin I saw today, more than I have ever seen in a single day before, I could find exactly none of them on the GoPro footage.  I scoured it, looked at it in full screen, reviewed it over and over again, and couldn't find a single dolphin.  I began to wonder if I had hallucinated them.  Apparently, what is far away to the naked eye is even farther away, and even non-existent to a wide angle action lens.  The turtle is there, but if I hadn't told you it was a turtle, you probably wouldn't know.  On the footage it appears to be at least twice as far away from me as it really was.  The rest of it?  Gone.

So for my purposes, the GoPro was a total failure.  That said, I really liked the quality of the video it took, in spite of the wide angle distortion, and I snapped a few stills that I was pretty happy with as well.  I used the Chesty mount, which felt extremely secure.  Rather than stick a surfboard mount to my pretty Bote board, I just used the bungees on the front of my board to secure the camera, still mounted in the Chesty, and turned the camera different directions to get the shots that I wanted.  This worked for the calm water that I had today, but probably would fail in rougher waters.

I used the GoPro Studio software to edit and found it easy and pretty intuitive.  I imported a few short segments from my DropCam (it looks out my bedroom window at the ocean) and the software crashed pretty much every time, but the autosave feature kept me from losing any actual work.

I will continue my search for a camera that can see what I see and record it in a shareable way that my memory cannot.  Or maybe I'll just hold out for the first brain interfacing SD cards to be developed, or a neural network ala Lock In (interesting read by John Scalzi).  In the meantime,
paddle on.

Why blog?

The truth is, I don't expect that anyone actually cares about the portion of my life that I spend at the beach, or anywhere else for that matter.  But I have very recently found myself in a place where I feel I can enjoy time spent doing things that don't result in a product.  For instance, time spent at work produces cash to pay the bills and, hopefully, a happier, healthier handful of people who had the misfortune of having to see me that day in my professional capacity.  Outside of work, I have spent time raising children, and so far the product appears to be happy, healthy, well-adjusted young adults who will probably contribute to the well-being of society.  So far, so good.  I have spent time painting, typically resulting in a nice piece that can be hung on a wall and viewed over and over again, or writing something that can be experienced over and over again.  Even when I work around the house, I am usually painting a wall, or planning the redecoration of a room, or preparing a meal - all things that produce something in the end.  I can measure how my time was spent by looking at the products of that time, even it it's just a pile of folded towels and underwear.

Now, I'm finding myself paddling through the rough surf, struggling to keep my board straight to get through the crashing waves without getting thrown off, so that I can stand up and paddle along the coast beyond the surf, crossing paths with the stingrays and jellyfish as I enjoy the solitude of the ocean.  I stand on the balcony with binoculars in my hands and watch a family of dolphins meander along same path that I paddled earlier in the day, breaching the surface in playful arcs and exclamations.  I explore intercoastal waterways leisurely on my modern day version of the ancient native's rafts, waterways that I have crossed by bridge in my car countless times without thinking twice about.  I am allowing myself time for activities that are valuable only in the moment of them, and that carry no product forward.  I can't come home after a morning of kayaking and say, "Here, honey, have this bit of memory I made today."

But I'm really not all that free of the need to see a product come from my efforts, and, frankly, I'm not all that good at retaining memories without help.  I find that I much prefer to head out on my bicycle for a ride up the beach if I have my camera in the basket.  I have purchased waterproof pouches for my iPhone, so I can take it along while I paddle or ride and log the day's trip, both by GPS tracking and photographically.  I am trying out a GoPro, so I can bring back images of the hammerhead shark that ate a fish in midair twenty feet in front of me.  Because, you see, I still need to have a product to show for my time.  Maybe it stems from the days in medical school, where, as a new mother with an adorable but demanding infant, I had to make efficient use of every minute of my day.  I feel a need to have something to show for it, to prove that I did something useful with it, and that I didn't waste it.  We only have so much time, after all.

So, this blog is part of my proof, my documentation, my accomplishment.  It will allow me to continue enjoying those activities whose only product is a sense of tranquility and wellness.

And a blog that no one will ever read.