Cabbage Tree Bay, Manly 2013. Filming myself with GoPro with the “okay” signal
After enjoying diving enough to come to the conclusion it was something I was going to continue to do occasionally and with a once in a lifetime holiday to French Polynesia coming up I decided it was time to invest in a new dive camera. Although I enjoy the amazing shots people manage to get with their expensive camera rigs I wasn’t looking to spend a fortune and was really just looking for something to help capture the moment so I can re-live the dive experience and also share it with my wife who doesn’t dive.
It didn’t take long to look into GoPro’s, they pack a powerful punch for the price. Possibly one thing which attracted me was the lack of view finder and the ‘point and shoot’ attitude, in that it would encourage me not to get too carried away trying to get the perfect shot and I could focus on the dive itself. After some research I got purchased a GoPro Hero 3+ Black, Backscatter Flip3.1 Dive filter and GoPole Grenade Grip. A dive filter is a must in my opinion, after about 6m down you lose the colour red and it appears grey. Without a filter a beautiful bright fish or coral can appear very dull. The Backscatter filter not only corrects this but helps the water to appear more accurately coloured as well. They have different filters for different depths and the dive filter is meant to only be optimal to around 15m, while it is still better than no filter at 20m, it looks its best around 10-15m. Since generally that is the majority of diving I figured that would be most suitable at this stage. With the GoPole, I did not expect it to be most suitable, but it had been a good 8-9 months since my last dive and I didn’t want to have to worry about carrying any larger attachments when I would be focusing on the dive itself.
Next I wanted to give it a good ‘wet test’, I didn’t want to get to a foreign country and find out it didn’t work properly and have no camera for all the dives. So I booked a double shore dive at Cabbage Tree Bay at Manly to give it a test.
Cabbage Tree Bay, Manly 2013. A Wobbegong snoozes in the open with a diver in the background for some perspective.
Overall I was extremely happy with the result. With two dives the battery died just before surfacing on the second dive, but I was filming gearing up etc before the first dive. Looking at the video, I was impressed with the colours, to me it looked almost exactly as I remember seeing it when I was underwater, which is exactly what I wanted! I did learn some lessons however. Camera shake is a big problem with no built in image stabilisation, you really need to practice having a steady hand in crucial moments to get a good stable shot (this can be adjusted with video editing software later but only to some degree). The other issue was lack of a viewfinder. I found in many of my awesome panning shots of beautiful Wobbygong sharks, I had shot too high and only caught half of the shark in the bottom of the frame. Being conscious of these things will help me to improve my shots for next time.
However as mentioned, I’ve been extremely happy with the decision to use a GoPro for an amateur dive camera, even though many of the shots were shaky I was able to pull together some clips to make the video below from the ‘wet test’ of my GroPro camera. I hope to share even more videos later but for now I hope you enjoy this one (I recommend full screen and change the settings to 1080 HD in the lower right for the best viewing):
If you have any questions on how I filmed this feel free to let me know in the comments below.
