I recently picked up a GoPro Hero 13, and I have to say I’m blown away by the quality of the images and the video. Quick disclaimer the image above was shot on my Canon 5D MKlll and not on the GoPro.
I’ve had a few of these small cameras over the Years, mostly hand me downs which are now sitting in the cupboard coated in that sticky film that electronic devices seem to get after a decade… what is that stuff!? It’s gross and almost impossible to remove, if anyone knows and has an idea how to get the stuff off please leave a comment.
The Hero 13 is an all round great option for Adventure video and photography, it’s compact size (larger than the previous models I’ve owned) in unobtrusive and I’ve happily sat in on the edge of the Bird feeder with no issue, the birds seem unaffected by its presence. If like me you have somewhat chunky fingers then the swipe and slide menus can be a bit hit and miss, but once you get the hang of it they’re very intuitive.
It’s setup with various scenarios pre-installed but they can all be tweaked as necessary. The short clip below was using one of the presets and it was just a case of selecting that preset and hitting go, the camera took all the guess work out of having to set this up and just let it run. The one down side is the battery life, and if you want to run it for more than two hours (which lets face it is already quite long) you do need an external battery. I’ve yet to splash out on one of these but when I do I’ll be testing it and reviewing it here for others to see.
A basic short clip shot from behind the house, set at 30 second shutter there is a small blur in the stars. I turned in camera noise reduction off and it did turn out quite noisy. Bought into DaVinci Resolve and colour corrected to lift the exposure a wee bit and do a small dynamic zoom and track.
Annoyingly I had to send my one back due to a dead pixel that was only really visible on long exposures like this, and while it’s easily fixable in post, it’s not something I was happy with after dropping over $650 on the camera. I’ll see what the NZ arm of GoPro has to say about it and hope they exchange it with no arguments especially as it was only a month old. Other than that the camera has been awesome.
