Our new addition to the GoPro

Along with Kite Vision's Phantom 2 Quadcopter is our small, but very clever camera, the GoPro Hero 3+ Black Edition. It may be small but the quality of its aerial images always seems to amaze us! Whilst the Phantom 2 was made to fit this camera we have noticed a slightly strange thing occurring on the footage from one of our shoots. This takes the form of horizontal black lines moving along the screen when the camera is positioned towards the sun and in particular when shooting in the midday sunshine. This is a result of the cameras filming speed picking up the shadows from the sun beaming down on the props. Each prop casts a shadow upon its rotation over the lens of the GoPro.
 This video below shows the lines appearing for a few seconds on our test footage of the Tamar Bridge.

                                  

Although this is a fairly rare occurrence especially when using our First person viewing monitors, we are perfectionists so it was a priority to try and stop this from happening on future shoots. After a little bit of google searching we found that this is a fairly common among drone flyers and luckily there is a brilliantly simple solution! We got a bit of black card, cut it into an appropriate shape and stuck it around the lens with strong tape to create our very own lens hood. This simple correction enables the shadows to be blocked from the lens, consequently putting a stop to any black lines appearing on the footage.

Since taking these photos the lens hood has been tested several times and been adjusted slightly, and its working great! Due to the high sensitivity of our stabilising gimbal any extra weight can cause issues, so this super lightweight and more importantly cheap and convenient fix is perfect.
A simple problem with a simple solution, High Five!