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Old 08-07-2010, 06:47 PM
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Default Dania Erojacks AND Eyeofmine.com vs. Standard GoPro Housing Underwater

Been playing around with the eyeofmine.com GoPro HD housing with corrective flat port over the last few dives. As some will know, the dome port on a standard GoPro housing although rated for service to a depth of 180 ft. wasn't designed to correct for the added refraction of water. Accordingly the GoPro images are out of focus. This adds an artistic quality to the video along with some other nice attributes. The stills are sufficiently out of focus and of low quality to where I don't even shoot stills underwater with the GoPro HD. The stills out of the eyeofmine.com housing look a lot better. All of these stills were shot with the eyeofmine.com housing today.



Here is an available light shot of Meta. The water was somewhat turbid with viz. about 25 ft. at this point. It was early around 9:30 am so the sun was still somewhat low. The GoPro was set on R5, despite which there was some minor vignetting in the frame corners. I usually cropped it or cloned over the small dark wedges at the frame corners. Without Photoshopping the corners could be distracting in the images.



Here is Noonie who apparently has tired of swimming and has taken to walking. I don't have any stills of this particular reef using the GoPro as I gave up shooting them underwater long ago with that camera. That is until now.



This is a shot Meta took of me with an Olympus housed DSLR, not sure which one or lens was in use however. Visibility wasn't the greatest at that point.



I shot this of Meta a few seconds after the above photo for comparison. The GoPro uses a wide angle 170 degree field of view lens making him appear further away than he actually was. I suspect Meta was using something closer to medium field of view.



This is the same photo of Meta that shows up at the start of this post but without Photoshop processing. You can see some vignetting in the image periphery. I usually Photoshop all stills I upload as a matter of habit. In this case it does help to clean up the image.



A look down over the Erojacks and some ahermatypic zooanthid cover, Palythoa mammosa (the yellow fleshy polyphy stuff).



An uncorrected still shot from a standard GoPro HD housed camera at the R4 (960p) setting. Note how severe the loss of focus is at the periphery of the image. This was shot in good light and visibility, in lesser conditions the out of focus error usually is more apparent.



This was a dive scheduled by a local, real active meetup group: http://www.meetup.com/goldcoastscuba/



Ed travels in along the reef.



Gotta love the way the GoPro treats the sun underwater, with or without the corrective port.



There's Tom the dive organizer.



Dan swimming along, carrying the Bladefish 5000. More on that soon.



An uncorrected photo from a standard GoPro housed camera with significant focus errors.



Another look at P. mammalosa using the eyeofmine.com corrected housing.


Comparing video out of the two housings in fairly poor viz. and so so lighting. It seems the better the viz., less turbid the water, brighter light and closer the subject really shows off the better resolution of the eyeofmine.com corrected housing. I was using the standard GoPro housing on R4 (960p) and the eyeofmine.com housing on R5 (1080p) to reduce viginetting. Have to say I really don't see any viginetting in the video unlike the stills with the R5 setting. The value of the eyeofmine.com housing really shows up after 1:42 in the video.




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Last edited by admin; 01-11-2012 at 08:45 AM.
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