GoPro Photography

Over the last year, I’ve really started using my GoPro camera more for photos and less for video..

It’s common knowledge that the GoPro shoots remarkable video, but if you look around on social media, a lot of the Jackson Kayak team has been producing outstanding photographs with their cameras.

The GoPro has two “modes” in particular that allow us to obtain these pictures.  
1) The “time lapse” mode can shoot a photo over a time interval, the fastest interval being every half a second.   So if you are paddling a challenging rapid or reeling in your big fish, it can take a large number of photos in a short amount of time.  
2) The “burst” mode can shoot a large number of photos over a period of 1-3 seconds.   On the GoPro Hero3+, I find the ability to take 30 photos in a second, or 30 photos in 3 seconds to be pretty amazing.

Why is this so powerful and useful in getting the ultimate shot?   Any great photographer takes hundreds of photographs, the majority of which won’t be anything special, but a few are likely to turn out amazing.  It’s simple – the more pictures you take, the more likely you are to get the money shot.

I will often set my camera up on time lapse mode before entering a rapid.   At the end of the rapid I turn it off.   If the rapid took a minute to paddle, I might have to sort through over a hundred photographs.   If I’m doing a seal launch or trying to nail the shot of a specific move, I will use the burst mode to make sure I get the perfect shot.   An optional wireless remote, or the free GoPro app, and a friend to operate this can be extremely useful.

At the end of the day, I will use the GoPro app to sort through the photos I have taken, which usually is a few hundred pictures.   I will download the best ones (often only five or ten) to my phone in high resolution.   While the raw photos look great, I will often use a third party app to edit my photos (like photoshop) in a way that looks good to my eye.

So many of you reading this have GoPro cameras.   I would recommend trying this out with the mount attached to your Jackson Kayak, or any mount, and see what kind of images you can create.