I’ve been working on a project about my local river Thames. It has been going on for years. I have a lot of images of people beside the river, or with a toe in it, but that was not completely working for me. So I looked at waterproof cameras and found the Osmo Action 4. It was around the cheapest at £170. And it is waterproof. This is a camera built for proper action. You can video yourself on a surfboard flashing through a hollow wave, or diving on a shipwreck, or snowboarding down a mountain. I don’t do any of those activities but I did want to see what I would get if I stuck the camera underwater on a pole, without getting in the river.
The Action 4 shoots 4k video in both wide angle, or 4 x 3. It also shoots stills and it can shoot those in jpeg or RAW. The Osmo company has an excellent web site with every model and all the specs, plus help videos, which is going to be a lot more useful than me trying to pretend to have some technical knowledge. I will just stick to my experience with this little box on a stick. There are other brands like GoPro of course, I just didn’t get that far. Yet. I am discovering an extraordinary amount of low cost tech that does really work (via a friend in the TV industry). This side of the industry has grown with the explosion in personal video making, and the expansion of the web, You Tube, Instagram and the rest. Perhaps I am a bit late to this treasure chest of wireless microphones, cheap gimbals, drones, and cameras. But I think it has amazing potential to be used alongside “conventional” kit.
I set off for the source of the Thames, with my new Action 4, new wellies and a new telescopic pole. The source, or spring, moves about depending on the gods. These shots were taken in 2026 and when i go back in a few weeks i would not be surprised if it has dried up.
The first image, above, was shot in stills mode . You run the camera from an app on your phone, and it didn’t take long to discover the bluetooth signal starts to break as the camera submerges. To get RAW stills is a bit of a cat and mouse game with the signal, as you press the shutter button on the phone. It’s definitely not going to work one foot under. And it wasn’t designed to. You can manually press the shutter at any depth, if you care to get wet. To keep the camera rolling below the surface, I use video. Press the shutter manually or on the mobile and jump out of an aircraft (with a parachute) and it will not stop running.
To get RAW images does require a bit of fiddling and dipping the camera in and out of the water. I also started shooting video, then breaking the video into single frames. The bonus here is to find frames you would never see otherwise. The flip side is these frames are lo-res. But they can be interesting, and I’ve included one below.
Getting focus is another issue with this camera. You cannot get too close and I think all the effects of water and light change everything anyway. Put another way; I don’t know the answer but i looked it up and straight away there was a Youtube Vlogger talking about hyper focal distance (with his cheap but good wireless mic) and someone in the comments mentioned macro filters and someone else said the GoPro Hero 5 had the best minimum focus they knew of. I’ll be studying all that but I am happy for now with the distorted, magical, surreal images that came from the deep. Well, not that deep!
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