A couple of shots from the Utah tailgate this morning.  The new “old” GoPro 3 Black is much better for aerial photos than the 3+ Black…

I took the Phantom for a flight today, just 8 minutes of time above one of my least favorite (okay, my least favorite) courses in town.  The place is called Old Mill and it is 18 holes squeezed into an area suited for nine.

Old Mill

The lighting was very gray and cloudy, so the images pretty much suck.  But even with that bad lighting, I could tell that switching out my GoPro 3+ Black for the 3 Black was a wise choice.  The imagery is much better focused.

Can’t wait to get some shots in decent lighting conditions.  Unfortunately, it is very cold here and we won’t be seeing any “green” grass here until April or May of next year.

I’ve been reading quite about about the GoPro 3+ focus field issues.  It seems when moving up to the 3+ model, GoPro changed the focus field so that closer items were more in focus.  The byproduct of that tweak is that longer distance items are not as in focus.  I’ve thought that some of my images were fuzzy, but attributed that to the poor quality JPG compression the GoPro seems to have.  The JPG artifacting in the GoPro is very disappointing.  But keep in mind I’m used to shooting a Nikon DSLR with a big piece of glass and processing my images in raw format.

Since today was the last day I could take my H3+ Black back to Best Buy, I shot a couple of images with it and compared the focus on the same shots with my old Hero 1. The hero 1 was more in focus beyond about 6 feet.

I went back to Best Buy and they happened to have some of the old 3 Blacks in stock. So I exchanged my 3+ Black for a 3 Black. The kicker? I got $75 back. I hope downgrading to the 3 Black from the 3+ Black turns out to be the best move.

More to follow.