Gadgetory

I love going to the beach whether I'm on vacation or going local I spent as much time there during the summer as I possibly can it's a place for me to collect my thoughts and ponder my minuscule existence in the vastness that is the universe it's also just a ton of fun I love playing in the water skateboarding on the boardwalk surfing you name it for me going to the beach is always a great time the beach also kind of sucks it's hot and there's sand everywhere which I find in my shoes and in my clothes days or even weeks after I go and there are no power outlets which is fine for some people but I don't want to leave the beach with a dead phone so if I'm gonna track all the way out to the beach we're gonna have to solve some of these problems first I've done some really crazy stuff with action cameras for The Verge everything from riding skateboards to go-karts to planes to Indy cars so if there's anything that's gonna get me into the water it might be that so we reached out to Mikey to temple who's a filmmaker and a pro surfer to see what he could do with GoPros newest camera this is a guy that's shot all over the world with just about every kind of camera you could imagine how did you get started in surfing and filmmaking I had gone on a trip to the Maldives we were sailing around from I told it's all like a dream trip and I was going man how do how do we not have someone shooting motion on this right now I got a friend in Florida who there's a really great filmmaker I was like hey let's let's make a surf film we'll go travel around the world we do like five or six trips I have no clue what I was doing and that's kind of what what started my filmmaking and from there I haven't stopped Mikey took us out to one of the private beaches near his home in Montauk whoa it's a camera technology you know were you able to use waterproof cameras the first surf film I did we actually did on all super 16 so a Bolex water housing it's like pretty much the biggest nightmare there is so we got the newest GoPro here's the gopro hero4 session and i'm curious what you think something that's this small and this waterproof out of the box does for a surfing expedition if you want to bring this on a shoot that being that it's that much smaller is insane yeah that's the only problem with them the bigger one is it's a lot it's a big commitment when you take it in the water if you're shooting with it in your mouth or if you have a handle with it or something like that you have to pay attention yeah you've got it you've got this thing but that could change things even more than the GoPro already has this thing tops out around 1080p 1440p it doesn't have 4k is that something you worry about as a filmmaker I mean everything has limitations but as long as it's shooting 60 at 1080 if that's all you really need Mikey was only out there for a few minutes but he was still able to get some pretty amazing shots like this POV shot from his hand which was using GoPros new hand mouth but the waves weren't large enough for him to do much more than that or for us to get out there ourselves so we went to our backup plan so Mikey we brought along this underwater sea scooter thing yeah and you can just really just like take it it's like you're James Bond under there sounds like something I'm gonna need I've never surfed before the CDC scooter is more or less a toy that pulls you in the water at 3 miles an hour it's fun but the choppy ocean gave us some trouble especially for Sean every time I went out there with it it just felt like I was getting pushed around by the water and not being pulled around by the CD so yeah it didn't work that great at pulling us but it did allow us to get some great underwater footage with the GoPro we had somebody in the water shooting with a Canon 5d Mark 3 and we honestly like the GoPro footage better it's more dynamic and plus the cameras just so much smaller it was small enough that we could forget about it and do what you're supposed to do at the beach and that's have a great time after Mikey took off Sean and I set up camp inland to check out some more Beach tech one of the big problems I have was going to the beach is there's sand everywhere so one of the things I found is called the sand dousset towel it's got a special material on the bottom that not only repels sand it also won't let water pass through it so let's test this then to see actually if it works right so yeah that does a pretty good job of keeping the water out yeah the nice thing about this towel is it's not crazy expensive and you can just find it online it's made in Australia well ship it anywhere in the world one thing that I think is essential when you come to a beach is having a way to play music as long as I've been going to the beach with friends or family we would always stop and pick up a crappy $10 plug and speaker and now we have Bluetooth speakers this is Logitech's UE roll it's waterproof you could toss it around in the sand and the best part is it actually sounds good we have the JBL pulse here too which is one of the better Bluetooth speakers but it's not waterproof no it's not waterproof in we've been playing back and forth with these all day I really think I like the sound to that thing better right a little bit cheaper too so I'm always worried when I'm out here that my phone's gonna die so what we brought here is a gold zero solar panel charger I really like the idea of this thing it's a little cumbersome it's kind of hard to set up there's a lot going on yeah the wires just kind of like hang out the back and everything like that so if you're gonna be outside all day and you want constant power and you have a lot of sunlight I think it's a pretty good option but it's not perfect so my solution is just this little brick that I got off Amazon it has a smaller footprint overall but this thing is pretty cool yeah but that thing you're gonna be able to use indoors that's true also yeah alright Sean as someone who doesn't often come to the beach what do you think the coolest thing we looked at was the thing that's probably gonna bring me to the beach more than anything else that we saw was the GoPro I really like the idea of being able to get something out of your Trek to the beach you know whether it's some footage or some pictures something like that but I think all of this stuff is actually like worth looking into if you want to like make your beach experience a little bit better not even so long ago five years ago the idea of coming to the beach with your phone with a good Bluetooth speaker and being able to stay charged all day was expensive and today it's really simple to do