Camera Fishing
Here's a new thing I tried, it's called camera fishing. I came up with this by combining my two latest obsessions of GoPro cameras and Stand-Up Paddleboarding and it's pretty silly. I take a GoPro camera in it's waterproof housing out with me on the water while I'm on my paddleboard and throw it in the water and then reel it back in. The camera is set to take 1 still image every second. The results are random and occasionally amazing.
Here's a couple examples:
Here's a link to my flickr stream to see the 97 or so pictures that I liked from this first attempt. There was a total of 4442 to go through. Made much easier with Adobe Lightroom 3. I launched at Point Dume and headed around to the little bay on the other side of the rocks where there's some kelp.
Technically there's not much to camera fishing. I've got 30' or so of nylon paracord attatched to the bottom mount of a special modified GoPro housing. The housing can be found on a website called Eye of Mine. It's got a flat front port. The normal housing that comes with the GoPro has a domed lens and isn't very sharp underwater. With the flat front port you get much sharper images. The only blurriness I notice is from motion blur when the camera resorts to slower shutter speeds in darker lighting conditions. Underwater gets dark pretty quick too.
You can see what I mean about the underwater blurriness in a shot in this new Vitamin Water commercial. Key Grip Tim Staubs was operating a GoPro attatched to a pool skimmer for an underwater shot which has a soft focus feel about it. I didn't know about the underwater problem yet when we shot and just added the camera in at the last second as an experiment. It's funny and made the cut. Luckily it matches in with the rest of the stuff in that spot just fine as it's a quick edit and we used a heavy white promist to get a weird dreamy sort of look on the rest of the dream sequence stuff. (clicking the picture takes you to the spot)
Well, that's my first camera fishing try. It's ridiculous and fun and way less messy than real fishing. Here is my favorite example ever of camera fishing: