I bought the GoPro Hero 8 Black last year to capture some vacation memories. GoPro is best for action captures, as they widely publicize and market their products. At first I thought of trying it out on one of my biking trails. I stay close to the city outskirts (though the city is vastly expanding, I still prefer to call it outskirts due to the close proximity to the highway and parallel roads that provide some great trails around)
I purchased a set of GoPro accessories online. It comes reasonably priced on Amazon and gives a set of gears to attach your GoPro for various activities. They range from helmet attachments, usual tripods, and selfie sticks, to vest and wrist attachments. The best thing about GoPro is the accessories have a standard fitment which makes these so popular and easy to use.
I will probably create a more detailed blog post separately on GoPro Hero 8 Black). Meanwhile, talking of some specific features, the Time Warp is a cool feature to capture extended activities such as some long navigations. It is different from the Time Lapse mode where your camera and viewport will be static, while it captures the changing surrounding over the duration. Another feature I found quite helpful is switching across Time Wrap to normal mode through an easy press option, all within the same video capture.
I tried various accessories for my biking activity, fixing them to the bike handle, and even the vest attachment. The best capture I got finally was from the wrist accessory. It provided a lot more accessibility ease to switch between the Time Warp and Normal capture modes, and great flexibility to point your camera to any direction of capture all the while you are biking. The accessory in fact has a nice rotating base that lets you swivel the camera at yourself. I usually do a 30-40 kilometers bike ride on under 2 hours. A fully charged battery has good enough juice to capture this activity duration. GoPro battery life is notoriously bad though. So to be on the safer side, it’s advisable to carry a spare.
Some snapshots from the video captures! I scale down and post-process the videos in Photoshop CC. So the snaps don’t do full justice to the high-fidelity video that GoPro is capable of capturing.
And a short edited clip, with the color grading bells and whistles!