One of the most common mistakes made with a sports action camera is the mounting position. How many point of view videos have you watched on YouTube or Vimeo where the video has been shot from a car bonnet, boat’s deck or a bike’s handlebars without any fixed objects in the shot. The resulting footage is just dull and boring and looks like a camera floating through space.

This is because the camera has been mounted without any objects in the foreground to act as a reference point for the viewer. A great example I will use for this post is a race boat. Too many times, I have seen race boats firing down the river or around the circuit with a GoPro camera planted right on the nose of the boat, pointing forward. The recorded footage just shows the water whizzing past and gives you little to no feel of the intensity of the sport.

This is the first in our series of ‘Mounting How-To Articles’ with recommendations and ideas for mounting your action sports camera to maximize the impact of your action videos.

GoPro, Contour & VIO cameras are usually referred to as point of view (POV) cameras. This may be one of their primary uses, but with the massive range of mounting solutions available the sky, or should I say in this case, the ground is the limit.

Point of View, or helmet mounting may be quick, easy and convenient. Yet in a lot of cases this is not the ideal mounting solution to gain the full effect of the sport or activity you are videoing. We have experimented with many different sports and many different mounting positions, be it standard, extreme and just plain weird mounting concepts. Some positions work quite well, some don’t. You need patience and creativity to get the perfect angle for capturing the action of your sporting endeavours.

There are quite a few cheaper Sports Action Cameras hitting the market at the moment, boasting 2X and 4X zoom. Although this feature sounds great and these products are receiving quite a lot of interest, the zoom feature is not what it seems, so buyer BEWARE. You do have to wonder why the market leaders, GoPro, Contour and VIO, don’t already employ such features in their best-selling cameras. If you have an understanding of the differences between Digital and Optical Zoom it is quite clear why they do not have this feature. If you don’t fully understand the difference between Optical and Digital zoom, here is a basic explanation.

Digital Zoom – This is being trumpeted as the big selling point on these new zoom enabled helmet and POV cameras. Do not be fooled, the 2x and 4x digital zoom is just smoke and mirrors. Digital zoom is an inbuilt software function of digital cameras and digital video cameras. This internal software feature magnifies the captured image or video then crops it down to size. The process involves taking a certain number of pixels and creating a larger image, but because the new image is based on the same number of pixels, the image quality and clarity is considerably reduced.