The GoPro Hero3+.. fun for travel

GoPro Hero3/Hero3+ Action Camera: Black Edition

Have you ever dreamt of filming yourself engaging in action sports, like surfing, skateboarding or skiing? No? Me neither. Although I’ve always loved a walk on the wild side, especially on a new continent, any action I couldn’t easily capture on my Canon EOS SLR (which comes with me everywhere) was happily confined to memories inside my head. However this year, I finally succumbed to the technological seduction and slick marketing and got myself a GoPro. And the verdict is: It’s fun, and great for travellers.

I love my technology. As much as I prize light packing, when I travel I’m normally accompanied by my Canon SLR, iPhone and Samsung laptop. I’ll capture beautiful landscapes on my Canon, and it can even capture HD video. The iPhone meanwhile, is good for flicking out for a party snapshot, or those days I can’t be bothered lugging my Canon around, while the laptop is good for storing all those memories on and researching new experiences. But there’s always been a bit of a gap in my recording of memories- if I’m out in the surf, or on a mountain, or doing some solid hiking, or if I just want to take a video out a precarious hotel window of the streetscape below, I’ve never really had a way to do that. Snowboarding in Japan a few years ago I found myself trying to snowboard whilst holding my iPhone, and other unique moments such as dogsledding in Finland went largely unrecorded. Whether or not that makes for a more soulful experience can be debated, but after only a few short months I can’t imagine being without my GoPro.

Out of the Box

The GoPro Hero3 (Black Edition) camera is seriously tiny. And light. It’s almost hard to believe when you first pull it out of the box, but it doesn’t feel cheap, having a rather nice matte silvery finish and the buttons feel nice and solid. There is a large shutter button on top, and in combination with the power button on the front of the device, you can cycle through menus and make selections. The third and final button turns the WiFi on and off. It’s all very easy to use, and there are LEDs on all sides to let you know that the device is recording, no matter what angle you find yourself looking at the camera from. It is little features like that that make you feel that this thing has been engineered to perfection. In addition, the WiFi indicator is a blue LED. I love blue LEDs. The camera itself is vaguely reminiscent of little spy cameras from Get Smart or old Bond movies, and this adds to its appeal. It’s a very tasty little unit. The recently released Hero3+ is basically the same camera, but smaller again still!

The GoPro Hero3+.. fun for travel
The GoPro Hero3+.. fun for travellers

The Hero3/3+ comes with a waterproof housing, which allows it to be taken underwater, for activities such as surfing, swimming, or snorkelling; but also allows its use in the rain or snow without worry. The waterproof housing attaches with some screw bolts to adhesive mounts, which you can stick to your snowboard, surfboard, bike helmet, or wherever you want to record from. But here’s my first gripe about the GoPro. There’s only 2 mounts in the box, and you’ll undoubtedly want more. The GoPro is one of those marketer’s wet dreams, because once you have one, you’ll need to keep spending money on accessories to be able to do all the things you want to do with it. This wouldn’t be such a problem if the accessories were cheap, but cheap they are not. You’ll stump up A$30 (U$25) for a packet of new mounts, for example. And they frequently engage in the wasteful practice of putting more accessories in a packet than you actually want. For example, when I bought my surfboard mounts, the pack came with 2 mounts, which is ok, but then also an FCS plug mount. The plug mount is a cool device, but why would you want an adhesive mount as well as a plug mount? They should be able to be bought separately, but they’re not, if you want one you have to also buy the other. Likewise, the “Grab Bag of Mounts” or “Caps and Doors” might contain that little extra bit you might want, but it’ll come with a whole lot of other bits you don’t need.

In addition, you will soon work out that there’s no other way to attach the camera to a mount without involving the waterproof housing. This is a shame, because the waterproof housing adds a bit of size to the camera (though it’s still small) and it’d be nice to just use the camera on its own when there were less chance of it getting wet or damaged. There is a device you can buy called “The Frame” which allows you to do this, but again, it’s not something included in the box. The box does however include a “skeleton backdoor” which replaces the standard waterproof back door of the housing. The skeleton backdoor has holes in it, which gives access to the built in mic and allows better audio recording than the waterproof backdoor.

Lastly, the GoPro Hero3/3+ Black Edition comes with a WiFi remote control. The remote has two buttons on it that, when WiFi is activated on the camera and the devices paired, basically do everything that the two buttons on the camera do. It also has a little LCD screen identical to that on the camera, so you know exactly what function has been engaged. The WiFi remote is also waterproof, though only to several metres deep and not the same level of protection that the waterproof housing offers the camera. I’ve been unable to destroy it when surfing however.

What really brings the GoPro into a world of its own are the free iPhone app and GoPro Studio 2.0 software, which round out the device and really make it worth the purchase. The app can be used to connect to the camera with the built in WiFi, and allows you to control the camera remotely. You can do everything the included remote can do and more- for example you can view the shot in (almost) real time, allowing you to place adhesive mounts accurately and set the scene before shooting. You can also browse images and video on the device, and download them to your phone. From there, you can upload them to Facebook or YouTube or wherever you want. Meanwhile, the GoPro Studio 2.0 software is a great product for editing your videos, trimming them, cutting them, adding titles and so on. You can also use it to create timelapses. It’s powerful without being overbearing- if you’re not a pro editor, but get frustrated with the limitations of most free software, then you’ll love GoPro Studio 2.0 as much as I do. I even use it to edit the video from my Canon SLR.

Geeky Tech Stuff

The GoPro Hero3 Black’s video modes are numerous and wondrous to behold. Inside that tiny little body is the capability to record video at 720p at up to 120 fps, 960p at up to 100 fps, 1080p at up to 60 fps, 1440p at 48 fps, 2.7k at 30 fps, and even 4k at 15 fps! The frame rates higher than 30 fps give good ability to get silky smooth slow-motion, as in my surfing clip below, and you can even do 240 fps if you don’t mind WVGA resolution. I’m not sure what that would be useful for, but maybe if you were a golfer examining his swing in fine detail or a tennis player examining his technique or something similar, you might like this.

The video modes are all 16:9 widescreen format, except the 960p and 1440p, which are in ye olde 4:3. I kinda like 4:3 for some things- you might find that it allows more vertical space in your movies, so that you can see the ground, or your wheels. I find the 4:3 is better during surfing as it allows you to see the board and head at once more easily, when mounted on the nose of the board looking back. The camera also includes Cinema modes for 4k and 2.7k, which are 17:9 and would really only appeal to hardcore videoheads. For these people, the camera can also operate in a mode called “Protune”, which results in rawer, unprocessed video with subdued colours, allowing full creativity in post-production.

The camera has several “Fields of View”, including Narrow, Medium and Wide. Essentially, these correspond to different regions of the sensor- Wide uses the full image sensor resulting in a picture utiltising the full capabilities of the little fisheye lens, while Narrow uses only the middle part of the sensor, expanding the narrow, less-distorted central part of the scene in the final video.

The camera can also take still pictures at full 12MP 4000 x 3000 resolution, either one at a time, in a burst of images (useful for a sequence), or periodically for a timelapse. The timelapse images must be combined into a finished video using the GoPro Studio 2.0 software, but the process works well and is simple to execute.

Important Practicalities

All of this technological firepower is nice to have, and the 2.7k 30 fps mode in particular is stunning. The 4k 15 fps might be nice if you are filming a static landscape, or remote control footage from a drone, or something that looks grand but remains reasonably still, allowing accurate interpolation in post production.  However, with display resolutions above 1080p being few and far between at time of writing, it might be some time in the future before you can view these files at full res. Possibly computer monitors will soon start hitting higher resolutions, but 4k TVs or projectors will set you back thousands. In the meantime, your ultra HD video takes up extra space on your memory card and is downscaled by video software  to play on your computer screen. Worst case, your software will refuse to play it (like my Window’s Media Player on Windows 7).

Perhaps the biggest annoyance of the GoPro Hero3/3+ is the battery life. With WiFi off, I struggle to get through a 90 minute surf on full charge without the camera dying mid-session, which is a shame. With WiFi on, you’ll get even less. To get through several hours of activity, like a day up on the mountain snowboarding, you need to turn the camera off whenever it’s not in use and turn the WiFi off.  This is not really that surprising, because with a device that tiny, battery technology just isn’t up to it yet. Hopefully this will improve in the future.

Another important thing to note is that the included remote control, a much touted feature of the Black Edition of the Hero3 over the White and Silver editions along with the extra video modes, is less useful than you might think. I had grand visions of using the waterproof remote while surfing, so I wouldn’t have to reach to the front of my board to start and stop recording. I found a way of velcroing the remote to my arm, then made an unfortunate discovery out in the surf. WiFi signals, it turns out, do not travel underwater. Whenever one of either the camera or the remote goes underwater, the signal cuts out, and then the devices take up to 30 seconds to pair up again. This makes the remote basically useless for surfing, or any activity where water is involved. But when water is not involved, you can very easily use your phone to not only control the camera, but also view its output. So what is the remote good for? Well, maybe some dry land activity where you don’t want to have a phone in your pocket. To be honest, I haven’t found that situation yet.

Ultimately, due to the uselessness of the remote and the way the battery is drained by the WiFi usage anyway, unless you’re only filming something for a few minutes you’ll find yourself turning off the WiFi and just using the buttons on the unit to control the camera. Luckily they are really easy to use and make different beeping noises, so even if you have the camera on your head it’s still easy to operate. For setting up the shot, selecting a mode and reviewing footage, you’ll use the phone app and the WiFi, but only briefly and only if you can spare the charge to do so.

Travelling with a GoPro

Now there are other reviews out there that will wax lyrical about tech specs and performance but this being a travel site, and I being a traveller, I wanted to talk a bit about what you might use the GoPro for. Here’s a quick list:

In short, just about any activity where to whip out your SLR or any other kind of camera would be impossible or too cumbersome, such as these skateboarding and surfing videos:

But there’s more! The timelapse feature of the GoPro is so easy to use that I’ve taken a shine to filming timelapses with the camera mounted precariously on the front of my car or out hotel windows, as can be seen in the video of my drive to the snow below, or of the tide coming in at southern English locations in my England roadtrip video (see points 5:55 and 10:20 in the video below). The GoPro lens is tiny, and I can film better quality timelapses on my Canon SLR, but it’s much harder to set up, and I don’t want to hang the SLR out the window of a hotel lest I kill the camera or someone standing outside! A GoPro timelapse is also good for its 4000 x 3000 resolution, which gives you enough pixels to be able to pan and zoom at full 1080p without needing extra equipment, like I do in the England Roadtrip video.

For all regular video footage of life on the road, I tend to use my SLR, with its big lens, superior optics and ability to easily see what you are filming. However my SLR is limited to 1080p. If you absolutely love your large resolution, you might want to film using the GoPro. Alternatively, if you’re looking for a tiny camera which is capable of filming video and taking still images, that packs into your daypack unnoticed, you might want to use a GoPro for everything. For me, it’s just for action video and timelapses, filling a niche between the party snapshots on my iPhone and the superior capabilities of my SLR.

GoPro Pricing and Purchase

You can buy a GoPro Hero3+ for the best price here. For memory cards I recommend the Sandisk 64GB Class 10 cards. Please note that I will make a small commission if you purchase from the links on this page, and you still get the cheapest deal and help keep this website free and growing! Thanks for your support.

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