GoPro Hero2

This is a sweet, tiny camera designed to shoot video for extreme sports.  Their web site has lots of videos of people doing crazy things.

I use it to make How To videos like this one on fixing a toilet. Or this one on a one light mini studio.

I have mine in a waterproof case mounted to an elastic head strap. this gives the viewer a birds eye view of whatever it is I’m recording.

It will also take still photos in several modes.

1. One at a time

2. Ten photos in a one second burst

3. Time lapse photos for as long as its on until the battery goes dead or you turn it off!

4. Time delay. You can adjust the time.

It’s fun to use as a still camera. It has 170° field of view. Its not a fisheye, but there is considerable barrel distortion. There is no viewfinder, so you are shooting blind. It reminds me of using a pinhole camera. The field of view is so great that you pretty much are guaranteed to get your subject in the frame!

There are only two push buttons on the whole camera power (P) and shutter (S). You have to make any menu selections and changes by pushing these two buttons. So it is a slow and tedious process to make any changes or adjustments. Since I mainly use it for only one thing, it doesn’t frustrate me. It’s fairly quick to scroll through the main selections of video, camera, burst, time lapse, and timer. It gets time consuming if you want to go into the settings of any of those main options to make adjustments.

Here’s some test shots I took today with the pixel size and wide or medium angle choice. Click on a picture to see the original, unedited photo.

5MP Wide angle

5MP Medium angle

8MP Medium angle

11MP Wide angle. I had problems uploading so I did half to reduce the size of the original. oh well.

The first domino is laying flat on the table, with the end pushed up against the body of the camera right under the lens. The end of the first domino is 2″ from the camera body. The second domino is standing up 3″ from the camera body. The rest of the dominoes are 1″ apart.

It looks to me like they are all actually taken from the sensor as the same image, then cropped and reduce in camera. So I recommend leaving the still camera set to 11 MP and do your own cropping later to have more control of the final image. So thats one less setting to worry about

I leave the video resolution on HD because I have found no reason to change it. If you are low on memory that might be a reason to adjust settings. I found a 32 GB SD card on sale at Staples for $24.00 so I’ve got enough room for several hours of HD video

The photos in this page were taken with a D70s and a Micro-Nikkor 55mm AI lens, Basic quality, and Medium size (3.3 Mpixels). Click on a picture to see the approx 1 Mpixel size that I uploaded.