No Go With GoPro

 One of the best presents I got when I was young was a Poloroid Swinger camera. It was easy to use and produced pictures on the spot. I actually still have it stored somewhere in my personal museum of memorabilia. It was great for taking pictures like this one of the kids in the neighborhood.

In the past ten years I've been through a few cameras, small portable ones whose quality deteriorates with age. Last year I upped my game and got a GoPro camera. It's tiny but it's supposed to be state-of-the-art. But one thing I found out is that state-of-the-art technology in the hands of a 70-year-old like myself is not a great fit.

It has more settings than the control panels at NASA,. What does “time warp” mean on my camera? Or a “live burst”? I can imagine THOSE prompts being on a NASA control panel but not on my everyday ordinary camera.

There is a manual for my GoPro. It's 144 pages long. Who has time to study a 144 page manual so you can get a quick photo of the grandkids as they're decorating gingerbread cookies? With my old Swinger camera, you would just “swing it up”, turn a knob until you got a “yes” message, then press the shutter. End of story. No live bursts. No time warps.

Honestly, I'm not even sure how to turn it on properly. It only has two buttons but no matter which one I press, the camera turns on and immediately begins taking a video. I click a button to stop that but I then have to delete all these two-second videos of my hand, the floor, the ceiling, etc.

Okay, so my GoPro likes to take videos. I indulge it. I take lots of videos because I have a VLC photo editing program on my computer that will extract one or more still photos from a video I've taken. That's a handy feature when you're taking pictures of grandkids since if you're taking pictures of more than one grandkid they rarely sit still or smile simultaneously.

Yet my GoPro, as is its nature, doesn't want to make anything easy. For some reason, a video I take in my perfectly normal fashion turns up sideways when I download it to my computer. 

 Why, I have no clue. There's probably something in the 144-page manual about it but then again maybe not.

I thought, no problem, as my VLC video editing program has a feature that will rotate the picture back to normal. So I did that, but once I rotated my video to normal view, my VLC program only plays the video a few seconds before it crashes. No clue why.

Plan B. I have Shotcut, another video editing program. I upload the sideways video into Shotcut (it somehow knows to automatically rotate the video normally without my having to tell it). Then I export a finished video into a format that my VLC can play without crashing. Then I can extract the photo that I want.

If that sounds complicated, it is. While I'm jumping through all these hoops, something in the back of my mind is remembering the old Swinger jingle: Swing it up--yeah yeah--it says yes—yeah yeah--take the shot—yeah yeah—count it down—yeah yeah—rip it off.

You'll never hear a similar jingle for GoPro.