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.
