About the Ouachita Mountains

Tips for Recording Your Rock Climbs

If you're the kind of rock climber who likes to record his every expedition, just like a tourist takes pictures of every historical site he's visited or a beach lover collects shells she loves to remember her day at the ocean, you'll want to find a convenient way to preserve those memories.  Whereas in most other activities people have their hands free, with rock climbing, a person's hands are reasonably more focused on grabbing onto secure rock surfaces, rather than fidgeting around with other equipment.  For that reason, helmet cameras make for excellent supplementary equipment for climbers, so they can record their experiences without having to use their hands.

To get the kind of video quality you'd want while climbing, make sure the helmet cam you choose is secure, and sits in a centered position in the helmet you're using.  If the helmet sways too much while you're climbing, the video will be very choppy and you won't get the clear, straight shots you'd want.  Steady shots are going to produce the most watchable video feeds, so if you're a fairly experienced climber and can manage to take each step upward as stably as possible, the resulting video quality will improve as a result.

Lighting is something that should be focused on as well.  If possible, natural light always looks best and should be used.  So if you're free to go climbing any time during the day, you should try to do it during the golden hour, which occurs roughly for the hour following sunrise and for the hour preceding sunset.  The light that hits the surface during this time is soft, warm, and gentle, and will produce video that is very easy on the eyes compared to video shot when the light is harsher during midday.  If you can't get good natural light, you may want to pair your helmet cam with a helmet light, perhaps one that uses LEDs for maximum lighting coverage in a small space.

Here are a few last tips to pay attention to:  If you can, bring along an extra battery.  You never know when you're going to accidentally run across something that's so fantastic you absolutely want to record it, but don't have enough battery power left because you've been running the helmet cam all day.  To go off of that, don't keep the helmet camera on at all times unless you're fairly certain you're going to capture some great footage.  Otherwise, you're wasting precious battery power, and setting yourself up for scrolling through tons of video footage that's useless.  The better you are at only capturing shots you're going to use later, the less time you'll have to fumble around in a digital video editing program later on deleting unnecessary footage.