New Technology for a New Year

To help better immerse viewers into the world of a husbandry volunteer at the Aquarium of the Pacific I’ve invested in a GoPro Fusion this year to add some new perspectives into the critters and staff I work around every Saturday.

I guess it’s a holdover from my flight test photographer days in the early 90s when I was part of a team that was the first to embrace the then-new technology of digital photography to record the early days of the B-2 bomber. Many years and a couple of careers later I still enjoyed seeing what cutting edge technology can do to help document the world around me. You can see the influence in some of my previous aquarium videos such as using a FLIR camera to show how an otter’s fur helps it prevent heat loss in cold water, using a high-end telephoto lens to help in photo ID for green sea turtle research or teaching a sea lion to carry a selfie stick with a GoPro Hero camera to give viewers an action-cam look at how pinnipeds propel themselves through the water.

Why go through all this effort? Well, there are so many wonderful experiences that I’ve had in my 20 years as a volunteer that I’d like to be able to share some of them as best I can to show what a priceless treasure the Aquarium of the Pacific is to the community.

Check out my first attempt at using this new technology in this week’s video.