Playing round with the GoPro

A couple of weeks ago my wonderful husband got me a GoPro Hero2. I got it home and immediately started taking video of that wonderful husband who then threatened me with all kinds of nastiness if any of those videos ever saw the light of day anywhere. He needn't have worried cause I was just practising and you always throw away the just practising ones don't you .. I'll get better ones of him later :)

I took a video of the Big Red Ride a couple weekends ago, played with editing it and ended up with a couple of videos from that. I like the video thingy, tis interesting but what I'm really excited about is the photo part of it. Set it to take photos every 0.5, 2, 5, 10, 30 or 60 seconds I was dying to test that out! I was going to try it on the second part of the ride but I found out the first interesting thing about the GoPro before the halfway point on that ride, the battery doesn't last very long. So it went flat before I got to try out the auto photo thingy bit. I was disappointed, but you do have to learn these things don't you, next thing on the shopping list is a spare battery along with some new mounts for it.

Oh yeah the mounts, you can mount this thing anywhere right? As long as it's on your helmet, and there's some space on your helmet that doesn't have vents or little buttons to open and close the vents. So I wanted it on top of my helmet, thinking it would give me the best shots, but I have a rotten big vent and a pretty moulded section that the button sits in on top of the helmet. So I worked out how I would be able to mount it on the side of my helmet. It's not too bad a view, you have a bit of helmet in the view but I think I can work out how to minimise that, and I just need to work out how to not get quite so much bike and handlebars in the shots. I've been looking at mounting it at different places on the bike and one of the other things I am interested in getting is some RAM mounts. I'm still looking and working out what I want.

So I went for a bit of a ride today with hubby, just for a late brekky at our favourite cafe for breakfast and I decided to set up the GoPro for camera shots every 10 seconds. This is what I got ... (actually I got a lot more shots but this is some of the more interesting shots) (actually they aren't really that interesting cept to see what can be done and I'm sure a lot of you have seen it before but I hadn't so I found it fascinating, I actually enjoyed sifting through all the 350+ photos to pick out my favourites)

Here we go, photo number one ... looking up the street from our driveway at the red dirt in the vacant lot next door to us. I'm loving this photo cause it reminds me of my first impressions of Dubbo when I came here a few years ago to find a new place to live .. dry, red and dusty! But exciting :)

A lot of this route is the way I go to work every day so it's kinda boring to me, but this pic is exciting cause it's got the motorbike shop I go past every day in it, they always have something that catches my eye out the front.

The next one shows the guy who made eye contact with me while I was going round the round about then decided that he would cut in front of me and turn right from the left lane while he was at it ... I do love when they do that ....

Have you noticed yet how wonderful and blue that sky was today? It was bout 22 degrees too .. perfect!!

And after negotiating all that Saturday morning madness traffic .... (hehe) .... we made it to our favourite cafe, Selah Doro!!

The car park is out the back up that driveway and I'm pretty proud of the fact that I went in there today without a single tremble. I still don't love car parks but this one, even though it's a bit tight,  isn't quite as scary as there aren't as many cars around back there and cause it's so small I think the crazys take a bit more care.

After having our usual (we need to change it up a bit I think, they are starting to tell us what we're having) I got in the lead when we left the cafe. Terry said he was going straight home, he had work to do and was expecting phone calls, I figured I'd just head home too I wanted to check out the pics!

I'd noticed when I got to the cafe that the camera seemed to be pointing very up .. I straightened it and wondered if I'd bumped it when I was putting the helmet on at home or taking it off at the cafe. Then I turned it on and headed up the road with Terry behind me.

I should have turned left here if I was going to go straight home but I decided to take the longer way home. I was pleasantly surprised that Terry followed me, I thought he would just head straight home and let me go on my own merry jaunt.

Before too long that road turns into the highway out of town and you get to the 110km/h zone just seconds before you get to this turn off ....

Which takes you down a nice quiet little suburban street that has not much traffic and lot of lovely corners for me to practise on.

Like this ... (yeah I know you cant really see the corner but trust me that sign is doing the S bendy thingy and the road does too)

And this ...

Then you turn onto the road that eventually takes us back to our street, this one has a bit more traffic.

OK so not so much here, there's more up further really. Terry overtook me not far from here and gave me a silly grin (you know the silly grin of a man on a bike) and I was hoping the GoPro caught it, that was the sort of thing I was wanting it for!

Aww it missed the grin :(

Pulling into our house, with a nice shot of the garden and the front of the house. OK so the garbage bins might need to be moved ... and the weeds are going nuts ... shhh I still like this shot :)

To park the bike I ride it up that little path to the right then back it back til it's behind the gate.

And there we are, safe at home in our little cubby hole :)