How to Be A Hero with Your GoPro

Watching a good GoPro video can be one of the most vertigo-inducing, adrenaline-jacking, heart-pumping thing in the world, but watching a bad GoPro video – or hours of footage of someone’s helmet – can be painful at best. If you want to capture your best life moments with your GoPro, do the following. 

1. Adjust It Properly: Learn how the camera on the GoPro shoots, in which direction and how, so that you can position it properly on top of your helmet, allowing for the best vantage point of the terrain that you are skiing. We don’t recommend placing the GoPro on your person, as it can interfere with your avalanche beacon’s accuracy. Further, make sure that you are turning your GoPro on and off at the start and end of runs (unless you want helicopter footage, which is also amazing) to not only conserve battery life, but also to weed out footage that you ultimately won’t want to watch – although your family and friends might want to have a laugh (mostly at you flopping around in deep snow trying to get your skis on).

2. Build a Selfie Stick: Having your GoPro on your helmet is awesome for lots of footage, but another great way to capture amazing moments is to build a “Selfie Stick” – which, DIY style, is basically just a ski pole with a GoPro fastened to the end of it with duct tape (or some other type of adhesive). There are also GoPro sticks that are properly manufactured by professionals which have the same effect. Having one of these means you can point and shoot, capture friends in the frame, get footage of yourself skiing or snowboarding, and do panning shots of views and vistas. You can also attach it to the back of your backpack to get a great over-the-shoulder view.

3. Conserve the Battery: It can feel very “OH MAN THIS IS SO EPIC” when you first get out in the mornings, but you have to remember that the whole day is going to be on that level, and so you’re going to want to keep that battery life up to make sure that you can capture the moments as they span across the day. Turn your GoPro off when you’re not using it so that you can have it ready for when those special moments pop up. From the morning sun glinting on the snowflakes floating in the sky, to a wildlife spotting as the impending sunset turns the sky gold and pink while you fly home.

4. Pow Slashes: Chuck a few good-natured pow slashes here and there (hard hockey-stop style) to really capture that over the head, super deep, super light, super fun powder that you just can’t beat.

And here’s Tanner Hall, with an absolutely insane GoPro edit from Poor Boyz Productions.