I’m sure by now, you’ve seen this delicious footage promoting the newest GoPro. These little cameras can be mounted to almost anything, and a waterproof housing will allow almost any amateur biker, skier, diver or kayaker to shoot professional looking HD footage.  Here’s the ad that undoubtedly sold millions this year:

We got the Hero 3 for Christmas, and decided to take it to a mountain cabin this weekend to mess around with it.  As with any new technology, it takes a while to learn the capabilities and features.  Here are some of the early results, as well as our picks and pans for this little gadget.

The Hero 3 comes with two “sticky mounts” designed to secure the camera to a helmet or almost anything with a smooth flat surface.  I stuck one on a Nerf gun and got some interesting motion shots using a setting that takes a photo every few seconds (I set it to shoot every 30 seconds and let it go while we played).  Most of the shots were garbage, but with a huge memory card, you can feel OK about taking 100 shots and only keeping 1.  There’s also a way to film video and take stills at the same time.

The waterproof case is one of the best features of the camera, although I admit that I paused for a long moment before sinking it in the hot tub for the first time.  It just didn’t feel right!  This shot was taken during a fairly low-light situation shooting through murky spa water.

The GoPro is really made for clear, bright days like this one.  Low light and grey skies aren’t ideal for shooting with any camera, and 95% of my GoPro shots came out blurry when used at night.  Lesson learned: low light shooting should be done with a tripod using the included remote control (also, there’s a half second delay between pressing the button and the shot so you could probably do it without the remote).

As we expected, some of the best shots were accidental, like this one that was taken while Amanda was rigging Ziggy’s collar to carry the camera (big surprise, he stared at his food dish most of the day).  Note: in order to fit the camera to his collar, we had to change the setting from right side up to upside down.

 This shot was taken using the “burst” feature where you can capture up to 30 shots in 1 second.  Great for action shots, but again, best used in good lighting situations.

The wide angle lens is great for capturing panoramas, but you can expect distortion – see how these ice cycles have a fish eye appearance.

As for the video features, we were excited to see how the camera would perform when we were skiing but for some reason, the footage appears choppy when we watched it on our Mac computers, and we couldn’t see footage clearly until we uploaded them to You Tube.  That’s disappointing, but even worse, after shooting 3 or 4 clips, the camera completely locked up and we couldn’t do anything with it until we drained the battery.  Heartbreaking because it was a blue bird day.  Here’s a video we managed to shoot – filmed handheld  at Steven’s Pass, WA.

Up next we plan to experiment with the time elapse feature (hopefully of the northern lights in Sweden next month!).  For that we’ll need a tripod.  Stay tuned!