One of the great gadgets I saw at NAB this year was the HD Hero camera from GoPro. It’s intended to be an adventure sports camera that can be mounted on anything from a surfboard to a helmet to the side of a vehicle but we’ve been having fun with it on our Opening Our Eyes journey going through markets and bazaars.
We had a fabulous day in Istanbul today before heading to our next subject in Warsaw, Poland. After seeing some of the great landmarks in the city, we spent a couple of hours walking through the Grand Bazaar wearing this amazing little camera strapped to our head. Depending on how fluid your stride is, you can get some stunning hi res imagery that gives a viewer the feeling that they are having the experience themselves.
You cannot preview the image you’ll get as there is no eyepiece, but the lens is a wide angle lens with auto exposure and auto focus so shooting blind isn’t such a crap shoot. You have to do a bit of testing to determine how it reacts to various light conditions but the exposure compensates nicely as the lighting situation changes and it’s pretty much right on target. The audio is also pretty good quality, at least for any b-roll shooting.
For the price and the ease of use, the imagery this camera shoots is spectacular and it’s a lot of fun shooting in situations where you might not be able to use a larger camera. I’m suitably impressed and I haven’t even really tested all the capabilities.
We had a lot of fun today with it in the Grand Bazaar and got a lot of funny looks and comments. Check out our walk through Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar and see for yourself.
Journeys of a Hybrid 
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