I asked if this camera made my head look fat and my favorite reply was, “No, it’s those big orange things.”

The headstrap mount worked pretty well, even though it was not particularly comfy. I had trouble getting it to sit on my head with the strap above my ears, which really only mattered because I prefer my electronic muffs to earplugs.

I used the GoPro app to control the camera. That worked pretty well with the exception that my phone kept dropping that network and I’d have to reconnect in order to regain control. I ended up running the camera longer than I wanted to because I couldn’t necessarily trust that I could turn it on and start recording in a timely manner and I didn’t want any shooting to wait on me to be ready.

My previous use of the GoPro wireless remote on an ATV was very successful, but the remote display also mimics precisely the size of the screen on the camera. For everyday life, my contact lens prescription is split, one eye for distance and the other for close up, but for shooting sports, I like to put the distance lenses in both eyes. This makes the tiny screen of either the remote or the camera difficult to see, especially in the somewhat variable but subdued lighting of the Winchester Gallery range.

In any case, I got some fun video for the match last Thursday.

Due to a fluke of squad logistics, I shot the stages in their actual order. I was on the squad that started with Stage 1. Because of some shuffling to pair spouses and newcomers with their friends on the same squads, our squad was too big and the other squad had to wait for us to finish. I was one of the a couple of people shuffled to balance the squads while the stages were being reset, so instead of 1-2-4-3, I got 1-2-3-4. Not that it matters, but it made editing the video easier because each take was in order. 🙂

So, as you saw from Stage 1, I skipped a target. This cost me about 10 seconds in penalties, pushing me to 3rd of 4 in my division and class where it might have been 2nd. Other than that, I did ok. Always room to improve.

The biggest thing I immediately see in analyzing the video is that I have not broken the cup and saucer grip habit. That my hands are big and strong enough to shoot OK with this grip is NOT a reason to keep it. I have seen instant improvement in control with a thumbs forward grip, especially with my 1911, but it’s just not habit yet.

There was some extra fun with the video for Stage 3. I noticed several things. On the first target (1:19 on the video), the TruGlo TFO sights are REALLY bright. Then on the second target (1:21 on the video), the brass hits the camera. Finally, on the second shot at the third target (1:22 on the video), the brass clearly helicopters up. Here’s the post processed slow motion of the whole sequence:

The slow motion processing had me experimenting with the things the GoPro and Kdenlive can do. Here are a couple of examples.

I set the GoPro to WVGA resolution, which it can capture at 240 frames per second. Using Kdenlive to slow that to 5% works out to 12 frames per second:

Sorry for the inside baseball view of my desk clutter…

This speed works ok, but you can kind of detect some “stoppiness” in it because 12 FPS is below the flicker fusion rate for humans. The same raw video played at 24 frames per second is not as slow, but seems much smoother:

The GoPro Hero3 can run at a variety of resolutions and frame rates, so the experimentation will continue.