Thursday, June 14, 2012

Go Pro, Go Boring


It seems you can't go anywhere lately without seeing at least a dozen people with POV cameras mounted on their helmets. The footage is everywhere, on Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, various bulletin boards, chat rooms and personal web-pages. I'm surprised we aren't seeing POV footage live streamed into public toilets.

Almost without exception the products of the POV camera are boring. And I mean, deathly boring. Imagine yourself watching paint dry and amplify the boredom about 6 million times and you are getting close to how boring the footage is. Particularly bad are the videos where someone has the head cam running while they ski a run - any run - all you see is one pole going forward for a pole plant, then the other, then the first pole, then the other.... Now that takes boring to a whole new level.

Then there are the videos of people out climbing. Sadly, but inevitably, the people who decide to film themselves are either teetering on the brink of incompetence or have long since fallen off that particular precipice. You could make a fantastic "how not to" series from these videos as you watch people rope up in stupid places, build and use dodgy belays, stagger their way up the normal route on some peak somewhere and, finally, rappel off some super manky rappel anchor.

On a bulletin board recently, I saw someone post something along these lines: "waiting my turn to summit Pelion." Turns out the dude posted this while waiting in a line of climbers on the summit ridge of Mount Pelion in the Tantalus Range for his "turn" to go up the rope (super-dodgy belay) to the summit. As you might guess, not long after, the POV footage showed up.

What happened to climbing just because you loved it?

Not doing anything worth filming, just looking up at the moon

No comments:

Post a Comment