THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO…

Now that we’re able to get out and about, you should make up for lost time by getting some thrills back into your life – and here’s our advice for how to properly capture those moments

Words: Rich Owen

One crumb of comfort from the unprecedented nature of the past year or so is that spending so much time at home has created a national longing to swap the couch and boxset for clean air and the great outdoors. Now that restrictions have been relaxed, we can at last leave the urban areas we’ve spent so much time in to explore wilder places. This recently reclaimed freedom to travel combined with a desire to get fitter and healthier has seen huge numbers of us getting out and about to enjoy clean air, the pleasures of nature and a life outdoors on foot, by bike, or on the water – which has now become even more appealing with warmer summer temperatures and sunny skies.

Of course, documenting such outdoor adventures is all part of the fun and the ability to take video and stills of activities and experiences in a natural setting can provide an extra incentive to get out and explore new places. While smartphones and conventional cameras can undoubtedly do a great job of capturing our outdoor activities, most of them are far too fragile to withstand being splattered with mud or being dunked in water. Even relatively benign settings such as the beach can be enough to destroy a conventional device. This makes a dedicated action camera a much better option for capturing video and stills – they shrug off smartphone and conventional camera destroying environments with ease and even the fanciest models cost far less than the vast majority of smartphones – should you lose or actually break one.

ACTION CAM ADVANTAGES

As well as being able to withstand the worst of the elements, modern action cams laugh in the face of mere splashes and some models can be operated underwater without a waterproof housing. They are also packed with handy features, in-built tech such as video stabilisation software is now common and can turn otherwise unwatchable footage into ultra-smooth sequences, while digital lenses allow you to switch from a wide-angle to a zoom lens at the touch of a button. Nearly all action cameras are extremely straightforward to use with auto exposure settings that give great results in the vast majority of light conditions. More advanced models can also combine multiple exposures of the same shot to add depth and detail to otherwise under- and over-exposed parts of an image.