Open Wide

I’ve been looking for a portable, off the shelf light suitable for shooting GoPro for a few years now and never quite found the right thing until now.

GoPro’s themselves have improved a lot (although there’s still haters out there) and to be fair they have still got a long way to go as far as low light/no light video is concerned but the Hero 3+ Black IS quite good.

For lighting I’ve tried those 64 LED ‘Photo Light’ things, sometimes using four at a time, various expensive alleged ‘wide angle’ flashlights but nothing worked out. Kept looking at these neat Dive Lights but nearly all will go up in smoke out of water due to lack of thermal cooling but then Underwater Kinetics, whose stuff I’ve been using for 20 years brought out the Aqualite. It’s designed specifically with GoPro in mind as a lighting source on Dive Trays and they partnered up with UK Pro (different company….I think) who designed a mount for it called the UKPro Flex Grip.

You can buy various heads for the Aqualite but as I wanted WIDE I opted for the 90 degree head. The light is powered by 18650 cells which I immediately binned for higher capacity (3400 mAh). Their specs say 1.6hr@600 Lumen so with the 3400’s I should get quite a bit more and I usually take two or three out with me anyway. Colour temperature is also neutral as its already at 5000k so no blue washed out shit that needs post to remove it 🙂

Here’s a few cameraphone shots of the rig and I will shortly post up some video clips in a local culvert that suggested this light is VERY nice indeed.

Aqualite with UK Pro Flex Grip

Hunting Morclocks in The Time Machine

“Are fish ginger?”
“No!”
“Hmmm, that must be a turd then…”

And so it came to pass that God gave Winch and me a day off, so we climbed aboard the trusty ExplorMobile and headed out into the countryside of middle England to look for Morlocks in the Time Machine…

We never did see a Morlock in the drain but we did find Mountain Bikes, Monster energy cans, big fish (including a laid back Pike who was over 2 feet long), fanny plasters, Golden Nuggets (of the turd variety) and some nice brick porn.In the 1850’s they drained the local Holme Fen which dropped the water levels locally and in 1852 they started work on the culverts to divert Bury Brook under the town, finally finishing in 1854. At the outfall Bury Brook joins High Lode which forms part of the Middle Level Navigation which eventually joins the OldRiverNene after a mile.The main reason for the trip was the actual junction of the tunnels and the remaining underground workings of the water powered town clock. The clock is still there but in 1920 was converted to run on electricity.The main tunnel carries Bury Brook (clean-ish) water and the side tunnels are stinky CSO’s. For anyone who says otherwise then don’t believe them!

If you are planning on doing the whole culvert and reaching the outfall (approx 700m) then be a smart boy like Winch was and wear Chest Waders, lazy boy here wore Thigh Waders and suffered wad0r breach halfway through, never a good thing when you are surrounded by floaters and are over 1000 meters from dry land. I poured several gallons of shitty/pissy water out each wader when we got back to the car, much to the amusement of the bemused locals who were probably wondering why two blokes were walking down the high street in 26 degree heat dressed in black rubber ;-p

I’d like to go back when there’s a LOT more water going through, the shots would be better and all the turds will have been flushed out…

Props to Dsankt, Otter & Loops for finding this place back in 2008

 

The ‘Money Shot’, in fact there’s two angles here cos I can’t decide which one I like the most, the first one is neat because of the water and the second one neat because of the arches.
 

Outfall
 

Looking for Morlocks…

Eye Eye Captain…

Been trying to find the perfect lighting rig for the GoPro Hero2 for months and never found anything I was happy with so this was a visit to a short but sweet local culvert to try something else out…

4 x 64 LED lights on a handheld frame running at a supposed 5500K (doesn’t look like 5500K if you ask me) and the GoPro was mounted on the Chesty harness.

This is a lot of light in a small space but the Hero2 still struggles to keep up so its reached the end of the line, he’s going on FleaBay very soon and I’ll drop some shekels on a Hero3 Black Edition 🙂

There’s a handful of stills at the bottom shot on the Canon on the way back through, check the pesky flies that quite artistically fooked the long exposure shots up :-p

Flies ignore long exposures…

Short & Sweet

Been out week after week trying to trace an outfall so not done any actual exploring for a little while, have got some backlog trips to post up soon though.This damn outfall is proving elusive, have tried various techniques from wading up and down a river (waderless!!) to doing a full blown dye test and still nada.

On a separate note I took the GoPro Chesty out a few weeks ago in some very short culverts, quite pleased with the output (better than head mounted in my opinion).

This little video was shot in 1080p/Wide, might have been better on 1080/Medium as it starts to fisheye a bit in places.

Hiatus

Not dead, not given up exploring, although I am totally sick of all the ‘Look At Me’ narcissists out there who are falling over themselves to show off sites in order to get praise from their peers.Is it possible to be an actual ‘Insecure Willy Waver’….?I’ve just been away doing stuff that I’m either not going to publish myself or I have been asked/ordered not to publish. I’m cool with both of those as I have nothing to prove to anybody and the fun is in the actual exploring, not showing off Trophy Pix.

Some lame crap I can post here (just to show some activity…) is some stills from a WW2 Operations Block shot back in October. We were there testing GoPro POV camera’s before and after a firmware upgrade that seems to have screwed them up somewhat. I seem to have lost the video footage we shot someplace but when I locate the files I will add them to this post.

It’s a shame about the state of this place, the local Chav morons seem to like trashing the place and holding raves in here from time to time, even knocking down a bricked up entrance to get their lame PA and Lighting Rig in here. Sadly the world will always be full of shitheads polluting the gene pool, its a fact of life.

Chesty Morgan

Now the title has grabbed your attention (but only if you are male and over 40) I will disappoint you by not showing you a pair of 73FF breasts but instead another piece of junk for my car boot.

I do expect to get a lot of use out of this particular toy though as it can be used in so many locations. In a nutshell its a small elasticated Chest Harness that lets you mount a GoPro HD Hero or GoPro HD Hero2 out of the way but in the perfect place for action shots and in a more discreet way than the ‘stands out a mile’ Head Strap Mount that I also use from time to time.

Stand by for some video content in the future 🙂