After starting the Compact diaries pages, I rather imagined posting tales and images taken with my iPhone, a Canon Ixus that’s still lurks in a cupboard and anything else that I might acquire that uses a smaller sensor. What I wasn’t expecting to buy was a GoPro!
One had been considered a good few years ago prior to a holiday in Florida and the knowledge that certain rides in the park won’t just wet you a little, there’s a certain expectation that some poor soul (often the wife…oops) will get soaked! That plus the idea that one could be taken into the water parks like Blizzard Beach without worrying about water, sand or anything else for that matter. But, rightly or wrongly, I opted for an Olympus Tough TG-5 that time around and it certainly delivered the goods; 4K video on water rides, full immersion into pools and the family floating along lazy rivers, generally a good camera.
Another trip to Florida this year prompted a re-evaluation as Disney at least, now allow cameras on rides if suitably mounted on your person. There may well have been body mounts for the TG-5, but there’s a whole industry behind GoPros and their ilk catering to those wanting to mount the things anywhere, bodies included. So it was goodbye to the TG-5 and hello to a GoPro 12 Black, along with a pile of ancillaries, battery grips and a learning curve!
It definitely qualifies as a small sensor, even the 12 Black which is the newest model is still only a 1/1.9″ sensor, yet it crams it with 27MP. In normal DSLR/Mirrorless language, that equates to a 5.62 crop factor when compared to 35mm/full-frame, huge compared to 2x for Micro-Four Thirds and 1.6 for most APS-C cameras. But we’re back to computational photography I mentioned in the first instalment and boy does the GoPro have some tricks up it’s rubber coated, waterproof to 10m sleeve. Amazing stabilisation, a fixed horizon mode which is mental, an extra lens you can swap with the stock lens to give you a 170 degree view and access to a while generation of people posting online media to help you get the most from it; help which I definitely need!
So now I have a couple of months to work out what I’m doing with it, before it gets attached to my wrist strap and plummets around assorted rides at Disney, is attached to the hire car windscreen for a trek down to the Keys, back on my wrist for a parasail, film my emergency shark avoidance when I take a dip in the sea and I might hand it off to the wife to film me making my own R2D2 to bring home form Galaxy’s Edge. 🙂
