Posts Tagged ‘camera’

The Hero 7 Black is the late-2018 offering from GoPro. This little action camera comes with an upgraded stabilisation called “hyper smooth”. Why it doesn’t come with the other cameras is less clear because there is no hardware behind, save perhaps some CPU, as it is all done by the software.

In this video, I’ll unbox the camera and go through the accessories it comes with. Ordering direct from GoPro will get you a beanie hat and an SD card, but is slower and a little more expensive than other retailers such as Amazon.

I’ll also show you the 3.5mm microphone adapter that allows you to plug in an external microphone into your GoPro. This is essential if you want to get good sound quality. On-camera microphones are never great at the best of times, and as the GoPro has been waterproof since the 5, completely sealing the unit has only made it worse.

Finally, I’ll take it outside to show you what the hyper smooth stabilisation looks like when moving around with it on a monopod.

I’ve used DSLRs for a decade now, including my 6D for five years. In that time, I’ve never had an accident with it. That is, until now.

I was out filming on a windy day and I didn’t put enough weight on the tripod. The wind caught it and over it went, lens first.

Luckily, it was nowhere as bad as it could have been. I put a UV filter on the front of all of my lenses in an attempt to protect them. It worked: the filter smashed but the lens underneath it surprised. So, a quick repair at the local camera shop, a new UV filter and a new lens hood and the camera was as good as new.

What should we learn from this? Weight your tripod and make sure you have a filter on the front of your lens, even if it is only there for protection.

I tried out my new lens at the pre-party. Unfortunately, I had to be in Donington the next day, so I was getting my coat out of the cloak room as people were still queuing to put theirs in. Never the less, good times were had.

While a great deal of fun was had at last month’s Wendy House, I arrived there to find that my camera’s battery had in fact died. So all I have is one photo that Hugh kindly took with my phone…

Although I really love my Canon EOS 450D, one thing I have noticed recently is that I’m not taking as many photos as I would like to because it’s particularly convenient to take my camera clubbing or to gigs where they search your bags using ambiguous policies.

To counter this I decided to get my self a cheap camera which could serve such a purpose. I finally settled on the Sony DSC-W350 which for under £100 gets you 14 megapixels (two more than my 450D as it happens) and easy point and click operation in something that will easy fit into my pocket.

Size was really my primary concern when making the decision and the W350 holds up well. It’s about the same size as a credit card so if you’re thinking “wow, it’s only slightly better than a paperclip” I should point out that that is a very big paperclip lol.

It comes in at a depth of 17mm, just slightly shy of being twice that of my iPhone 4 at 9.3mm. That seems a little bulky in comparison but it is perhaps an unfair test to compare it to the world’s thinnest smartphone, and it manages to come in thinner than most of the competition I looked at with most of the slim cameras in it’s price range coming in at around 23mm.

Picture quality is mediocre. It is significantly better than my iPhone 4 but having shot with nothing but a DSLR for two and a half years now, my quality expectations have come to rest somewhat high. Just viewing the photos on my 23″ monitor you can see the photos aren’t quite perfect but then for a compact under a £100, you would have to be very demanding to expect them to be – if I need print publication-quality photos, I’ll take my real camera.

What I do like is that the wide-angle lens produces usually warm images in comparison to my DSLR and as the camera’s main use will be taking shots of my friends while we’re out, this actually makes for more than adequate results for what I need it to do.

One of the problems we were having over at CWF was that we had a lot of lecture footage on DV tape – but nothing to play the DV tapes on! So having spent months trying to find a solution – trying to find a friend who has a high def DV camera, seeing if those “transfer to DVD” companies would just transfer to a computer format, asking local rental companies if they had DV tape decks, I finally gave up and simply rented a camera to play them back on.

Once I tried this however I was informed by the rental company that the very basic camera I had ordered was unavailable, so would I be willing to upgrade to a better camera, for free. Normally this would be a no brainer but I actually wanted the cheaper camera – the more expensive, the more complicated it was going to be and the more there was to potentially break. Never the less I agreed and ended up with this amazing camera – that I was just using as a tape deck!