A Typical Melbournian Hailstorm

So if you've followed this blog for a while you may know that I enjoy making videos, and have been doing so for a few years now. And while cell phones are a great portable video-taking device (seeing as all my previous videos were taken using them), some of the kinds of things I really want to do (such as long timelapse videos) aren't really suited for being taken by them (not that that's stopped me before). I've thus been interested in getting a dedicated action camera such as a GoPro for several years now; in fact, I first looked into it back in 2017 right before coming to Australia, but couldn't afford one at the time.

Fast forward to 2020, and with all the money I'm saving on not taking public transport and eating out during the week I could finally convince myself I could afford one. The latest GoPro model, the HERO9 Black, came out in September with some nice improvements (such as for timelapses), and after doing a lot of research into various action cameras out there I picked one up over a sale on Thanksgiving weekend! (GoPro has actual competition now, but its specific features were still the best fit for what I wanted.)

Tada! This was me attempting timelapses of the night sky. They're impressively easy to get, but not quite ready to show off.

I'm still experimenting with it, but today I've got my first video to show off. Last Thursday we were projected to have an afternoon thunderstorm, so I decided I'd put my camera out facing up and try to get a timelapse of the clouds passing overhead. Fortunately, I somehow started recording real-time video instead (still learning!), and it turned out that the thunderstorm dropped some hail as well (as they often do, in Melbourne, we had another hail storm less than a fortnight before that).

I was worried for my new camera, but more worried about myself dashing out into the hail to retrieve it, which worked out for the best as the camera's fine and I got a cool video of being in a hail storm. The storm itself passed in less than 30 minutes, so I sped the whole thing up 10× and made the following video out of it:

Anyway, that's all for now, but look forward to more—and hopefully more innovative and unique—videos from me in the future, as I figure out what kinds of videos I can get with something I wouldn't want to use my phone for. A hui hou!