Film Your Hunts! Self Filming Tips, POV Cameras, Handycam

Self-filming tips and tricks coming right up. So we live in a day and age now where everybody wants to get their hunt on film which is great and sometimes that's an easy thing to do and sometimes it's extremely difficult. If you have somebody with you of course it's a lot easier to have a person dedicated to the camera. You don't have to really worry about a whole lot. You don't have to worry about the motion turning anything on or off. The only thing you have to worry about is making sure that your shot is in his frame and sometimes that's even difficult really if we think about it. But when you're self-filming things get a little bit more tedious and difficult but there are a few ways to self-film that make things easier and the first thing that makes it easier is the wide array of different POV or point of view cameras that are on the market today and there's some that mount directly to your equipment. You can get them to mount onto your hat brim, over your headband. There's just a lot of different choices. Now all of them offer something that is good but most of them have their quirks along the way. I really like the Tacticams. We've been using the Tacticam 5.0 and I like that because there's a lot of different ways you can mount it directly on your bow or your crossbow that it is right there and easy and quick with no muss and no fuss. When you're dealing with all these other things even a secondary mount you have to reach out somewhere to turn something on in the heat of the moment and it's really easy to get busted but when you have it to where it's mounted directly on say on your crossbow like this all you simply have to do is reach up and hit a button and you're good to go. It vibrates. You can feel it. You can see the light. You know it's on. There's no question and it's really simple. It's right here and that's the only little movement you have to do and sometimes let's face it even that's tricky but this does make it a lot easier. That Tacticam also has several other mounting options and on the compound they have a stabilizer mount that also makes it really easy. When you're going to shoot you can just simply reach up hit the button get your release and be ready. Again does require a little bit of extra movement but that's the easiest simplest way to get a good angle on the animal that you're shooting without making a bunch of extra other movements while you're doing it. The thing you have to remember with no matter what weapon you're using when you have a POV camera mounted to the weapon is follow the animal. Our first instinct is to drop and see where did that shot go where's the animal going but you just have to kind of remember to follow through and keep that camera on playing with your animal as it's running away and then that way if it falls within sight you can get that on film makes it really exciting but it also will give you great direction if you have a little bit of a tracking job ahead. So you'll have your footage to kind of get an idea of your shot but also you'll be able to play back and see oh that deer did turn in next to that big tree so for tracking it can also be a big benefit to have that point of view footage to your disposal and again the tacticam and other small mounted cameras that are on the weapon itself whether crossbow compound or even trad gives you that great opportunity with the least amount of movement. Now a lot of guys want to have other views while they're in the tree stand they want to be able to see themselves they want to be able to turn and have commentary to the camera they want to be able to maybe have an over the shoulder shot to film that animal and them at the same time and that's where you can get into some of these really inexpensive mounts you can use the tacticam here we use the ions for our second angle they're really easy they turn on easy just a little switch and they're ready to go and they're really good and the reason that we use the ions for our close-up stuff is like so many other pov cameras they have a fish eye lens okay so you have this great big wide area which is great for filming close up but if your deer is at 30 yards it kind of looks like a speck way out there in the distance and they don't really do a great job for a close view where the tacticam especially the 5.0 with the zoom you can get right in there at 30 yards it looks really close really professional and it's high quality where some of these other ones even some of the gopro cameras some of the even cheaper smaller cameras that you can get at walmart like activions and things like that they do a good job but with that fish eye lens they're really only good for close-up stuff so those are the cameras that are really good to have behind you or beside you to get that second angle and it's easy to turn and talk into that camera from this distance and you're still because of that fish eye lens you get a good vision of yourself your background but you're nice and close for the sound and you can get really good commentary if that's what you desire now to step up from the pov's which would include gopros i like all these other little mounts i even convert like the easy hangers from any brand that you have that are your bow hanger i just drill a hole into them and i mount a screw that's got the same thread as these other cameras and i can just literally stick a small pov camera anywhere on my setup and have it angled any direction i want really simple and really easy so it's just a little trick to not have to spend a bunch of money if you are going to step up to where you want to film and you want to have a full video you have some other options here of stepping up to larger video cameras handy cams are fine for this i mean i've filmed with $10,000 worth of equipment in a tree and it is mostly a giant pain in the neck it's heavy you have to have special gear you cannot use a cheap camera arm when you have a giant camera here because of the weight and the stability and now you're looking at really expensive fluid heads you can literally go buy a $25 hme simple camera mount for any of your smaller cameras and be fine to get into the handy cams you know all of them do a really good job everybody wants to get into 4k really 1080 is all that you need i mean my tv doesn't even play 4k very well i have an old tv so 1080 does really good for me and everything that i do and you can find a really nice 1080 handy cam that'll do the job one of the other things for pov that you need to be concerned about is low light so when you hit sunset all of a sudden most pov cameras go straight down the tubes first you get a nice period of grainy footage and then you get a nice period of just black and you have plenty of shooting illegal shooting light left but those cameras are just not designed to bring in enough light so you have to be very conscious of that i would encourage you when you get a pov to really practice with it on your bow shoot with it at the target get used to what it does get used to some low light conditions know your limitations of that camera so you have a great idea of what it's going to do for you in the field same with your setup in your tree stand if you're planning on just grabbing all your stuff and going in the tree and hunting you're going to be sweaty and frustrated because it takes a little bit of time to get set up it takes time to screw in the mounts and sometimes you're reaching and the tree is really hard and and it's hard to get screwed in there you may really have to reef on it and so you want to be able to have your plan in place before you show up to actually video and it also will give you some good idea if you're able to get into your stand beforehand and just do some testing footage you'll have a good idea of your angles where do i need to be i'm sitting here if i draw back am i going to hit my camera there's a lot of considerations that come into play when you want to self-film out of your stand most of all you want things close you don't want to have to be doing high reaches to turn cameras on or really spending a lot of time moving because you're going to run out of time now another thing that as you start to get into the self-filming and you're really thinking it's the way to go you're going to have to adjust your equipment to what you want it to be starting off with the handicams it's fine there are some great small video cameras like this panasonic that do a wonderful job they're small it's light it's easy to move around they're dependable even the smaller type handicams are great but when you start getting into the bigger cameras or you want to use your dslr the dslr is heavy heavy heavy you can't use these simple camera arms with good success you've got to really kind of step up your game so you have to decide where you want to be what you want to spend a lot of times it's not necessary to go you know spend a ton of money you can get away with some just little tips and tricks and some smaller cameras and still film your hunt the last thing i want to mention is make sure that filming your hunt doesn't suck the joy out of your hunt it's nice to have things on film but when you're passing up on an animal where you may have that's your only opportunity and you're making the decision to do that because you don't have it on video it's a personal choice but you're probably going to regret it if you just didn't shoot the animal when you're filming kids especially their first hunt don't make the camera the biggest portion if they're going to miss out on an animal because the camera's not in the right position or whatever you just have to remember what's really important about the hunt is the hunt and the footage is kind of like a secondary thing if you're not doing it for a living just enjoy your hunt have a good time good luck filming in the woods