GoPro's line of tiny, popular, and affordable HD video cameras has turned a generation of extreme sports enthusiasts into cutting-edge filmmakers--and loyal customers. Here are some highlights from their best work.
GoPro's portable, popular HD video cameras have transformed a generation of extreme sports enthusiasts into cutting-edge filmmakers. Over the last few years, GoPro's users have captured, uploaded, and viewed a vast library of previously impossible footage containing everything from record-breaking BMX jumps to back-breaking encounters with Mother Nature to the flight of a seagull. Inspired by Tom Foster's feature article The GoPro Army, we assembled a small (but exhilarating!) sampling of the highlights.
Surf's Up
Founder Nick Woodman came up with the idea for GoPro during a five-month surfing trip to Indonesia and Australia, where he found himself "frustrated that pro surfers tended to be the only ones who could get good images of themselves surfing—because you needed a professional photographer or videographer willing to bob around in the water documenting you." Shot with a GoPro camera, this deceptively simple-looking footage of famed surfer Ramon Navarro sliding through a Chilean wave is an elegant illustration of Woodman's original vision.
Carried Away
The first few seconds may look like a horror movie, but what follows is a heart-pounding, fun-for-the-whole family, aerial tour over Cannes, France—an appropriate setting for what is apparently some seagull's directorial debut. "A real bird's eye video," said Lukas Karasek, the Slovakian whose GoPro camera was briefly carried off by this ambitious avian. (Some have cried hoax—Karasek was in town for an advertising conference—but he insists the footage is real. The seagull was unavailable for comment.)
Avalanche!
What does it take to outrun an avalanche? Thankfully, professional free-skier Matthias Giraud didn't have to find out. In what looks like the cold open of a James Bond movie, a head-mounted GoPro camera captures the Frenchman and his cohort as they narrowly escapes a cascade of alpine snow by skiing right off the sheer face of a mountain—with parachutes at the ready. Needless to say, high fives are exchanged at the end.
