In November we made another trip to the Muriwai Gannets as I wrote about in my Duckpond B&B post. One of my aims for this trip was to trial a GoPro mounted on the hotshoe to give a camera POV of tracking and photographing them in flight. I have toyed with this idea for a while and finally put some thought into making up a hotshoe mount and deciding on which GoPro model to use. The mount ended up being a simple job of attaching a flat adhesive mount onto an old hotshoe bubble level which has worked well, is simple and compact. For the GoPro, I decided to go with the Hero 4 Silver, largely for the touchscreen which makes settings and reviewing footage much easier as you don’t need to connect to the smartphone app to do this.

We had a very windy day which gave great flying conditions. Attached is a short video of one tracking sequence and an image from that session along with an image taken shortly after with a detailed crop. Nikon D810 with Nikon 200-400 f4 VR, ISO 200 1/2000s f8