Video short - Shark Feed With New Inexpensive HD Camera

[RickI]

Shot a gray caribbean reef shark feed of about 50 individuals off New Providence in the Bahamas last weekend with Stuart Cove Dive Center. I used one still and four GoPro video cameras including two HD units for the first time. Special thanks to Chang, Stuart Cove dive master and shark feeder extraordinaire for carrying one HD camera on his helmet and setting up so many great shots!

Have to say real impressed with what came out of the HDs (less than $300. USD each including housing rated to 180 ft.). Nice color saturation, UW image resolution could be a bit better but it is still pretty good. More specs at the link below.

Working on the complete video now, with lots of action, bites, bumps, shark tricks and more. Stay tuned ...

The video link and more background appear at:
Teaser Video - New Shark Feeding Video From GoPro HD !!! - FKA Kiteboarding Forums

Cheers,
RickI

 

[mako781]

Looks great actually...thinking about getting one.

Could you give me some more details on how it worked in the water, the buttons, etc? Was it extremely portable?

Would love to get some thoughts from a fellow diver....I would be using it for diving footage.

looking forward to seeing more of your footage!

 

[RickI]

It is very portable, the smallest housed camera that I've used in more than 35 years. I have only the one dive with the HD but a bunch with two of the WIDE cameras over many months. Both cameras are operated through pushing two buttons. Icons show up in a small LCD display. They can be a bit too small however the sequence is easily remembered in a short time taking care of that. The camera emits a beeping sound and light signal with changed settings. It was fairly faint with the WIDE, much louder in the HD. It takes a bit of getting used to but for the price and performance well worth the exercise in my opinion. They've made great strides in the HD in many areas, two big ones include power and memory. The battery for the HD is rated for 2.5 hours and charges in the camera via USB cable in short order. It can handle Class 4 to 6 SD cards up to 32 G, use of lower Class SD cards could cause recording problems. The WIDE is limited by shorter AAA MnH battery life and a max SD card cap of 2 G, (4 G with firmware upgrade). I used four of these (2 HD and 2 WIDE) on the shark dive. One in a chest mount, two on bottom anchors set at remote locations and one on the feeders helmet. I set them all up and activated them without too much trouble and still could enjoy the dive.

You should checkout some of the WIDE videos I have from scooter free diving this year. The resolution improves with the HD but the images are still pretty interesting, better in some ways that I receive from cameras that I own costing much more.

Many of the videos with green arrows were shot with the WIDE at: http://fksa.org/forumdisplay.php?f=92

For the low cost and unusual performance, even with some slight loss of sharpness UW, I still like the GoPro HD a lot.

Looks great actually...thinking about getting one.

Could you give me some more details on how it worked in the water, the buttons, etc? Was it extremely portable?

Would love to get some thoughts from a fellow diver....I would be using it for diving footage.

looking forward to seeing more of your footage!