Shooting Miniatures; GoPro

I’ve got a follow-up to pick up where I left off with this post; Advanced Camera; shooting miniatures

I did some thinking and talking and testing, and it seems you can only get so close with a scale model before the scale becomes apparent. The camera is essentially the viewer and the lens’ size dictates things, like camera angle, and how close you can get to the ground (table surface) etc. For example in this test I was using a 35mm camera, even with a macro lens and exaggerated angle there is only so close I could get.

However, this has got me thinking; what about smaller Cameras? The new GoPro Hero3 black can record very high quality video, and it’s size is just insanely small. Makes sense that you’d want to scale the viewer along with the scene. Could it be the best way to shoot scale models? We shall see.

But this opens a lot of questions; What about the wide lens distortion? How bad/noticeable is the auto adjust for exposure/color? what is the focal distance, and how close can i get to the model before the image is unusable?

Fortunately, I have awesome friends and one lent me his to test with 🙂

What do you think? I’m impressed. Obviously I pushed it out of it’s confort zone. I wanted to see where it’d fail, so there is a bit of too-close, to-wiggily, etc. but overall it performed better than I expected and I may need to pick up one of my own soon…