Apparently the newest, coolest way to show off your new camera is by sending it up with some professional skydivers and telling them to have at it. Okay, maybe it's too early to spot a trend, but Nikon did recently decide to follow in Sony's footsteps and send a couple of D5300s up with a pro skydive photographer to show them off.
There's no doubt the ubiquity of fake and mis-reported content on the Internet has turned many of us into big-time skeptics. Whenever we see something that seems incredible or outlandish, our knee-jerk reaction is to call it fake and begin searching for evidence of that fact, using our confirmation bias as a guide.
One video that elicited such a response from many of the people that saw it was this recent Sony ad that showed an a7R lens change happening in mid-air during a skydive.
Yesterday was the one year anniversary of Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner's insane Red Bull Stratos skydive from the edge of space. As the whole world watched, Baumgartner plummeted towards Earth from a mind-blowing 128,100 feet, ultimately landing safely.
The man free fell for a total of four minutes and twenty-two seconds, and if you want to watch the whole inspirational/terrifying experience from his point of view, now you can.
On its own, the video above is horribly filmed and some of the most difficult-to-watch footage you'll ever see, but what it shows makes it fascinating. It's a point-of-view look at what it's like to fall 12,500 feet without a parachute... and survive. Skydiver Lucas Damm was jumping out of a plane over British Columbia recently when his helmet-mounted GoPro camera smacked against the plane door and fell out of its holder. The camera, still rolling, fell the entire way down and miraculously escaped without any damage.
Next month a project called Red Bull Stratos will attempt to set a new world record for highest free-fall skydive in history. Skydiver Felix Baumgartner will leap from 120,000 ft (36,600m or 22.7 miles), breaking Joseph Kittinger's record of 102,800 ft set in 1960.