4) You can't really remember the dive until you look at your own video.

5) You post stills from your video to Facebook before packing or debriefing.

hmmm so i shouldn't use my gopro on my aff level 1 in couple of months? :D

Meh...Wear extra cloths & have at it. Winter jumping is FUN .

USPA has a recommendation that you should have 200 jumps before you jump with a camera, and that is an excellent recommendation. Skydivers MAY have enough experience at 200 jumps to do camera (although most do not) - but before 200 jumps it's pretty much a guaranteed bad idea.

There are some other indications that it's a bad idea to jump with a camera, and you may want to reconsider your decision to jump one:

1) You can't stand up all your landings but you have learned how to fall to protect the camera.

2) A lot of your videos from doing POV bigway video are of excellent funnels. You are positive you're not contributing to them but they always seem to happen near you.

3) You spend more time trying to figure out where to put your camera during the exit jamup than where to put your body.

4) You can't really remember the dive until you look at your own video.

5) You post stills from your video to Facebook before packing or debriefing.

6) While in the pattern you fly with your camera pointed at your friend's canopy.

If any of these happen to you, you may want to reconsider jumping with a camera - especially when you're not doing video, you're just a participant on the dive.

6) While in the pattern you fly with your camera pointed at your friend's canopy.

Meh...Wear extra cloths & have at it. Winter jumping is FUN .

I think i like extra cloths in winter :)

as for the camers, when i started thinking about jumping i started to look at different camera mounts options etc... (i love photography and i make part of my living doing product shots)...but didnt even occurred to me how dangerous it can be to a newbie, and that it will take a lot of time and experience before one can strap gopro.

2) A lot of your videos from doing POV bigway video are of excellent funnels. You are positive you're not contributing to them but they always seem to happen near you.

Wait! This happens to me now. Does that mean I should start jumping with a camera?

Great list, but you are fighting a losing battle against technology, stupidity, and the great world of social media.

20 years ago "jumping a camera" involved a helmet with 40 pounds of gear. We didn't need rules, only truly dedicated masochists got into camera work.

Then Handicams, 8 mm, miniDV, etc. and cameras are down to a pound or two. Today it's the GoPro. Fight it all you want, the next step will be a clip on device the size of a coin sending data wirelessly to a receiver in your pocket.

It's not 5-10 years away, it's possible now - there just isn't a big enough market yet. Wait for the next Facebook - "MeTube: All my life, on the Internet, all the time!" - and you won't be able to tell people they can't have their camera on all the time. How do you regulate that?

I think it is (sadly) unavoidable that focusing on the dive and ignoring the camera will move from common sense to BSRs to part of the FJC in the next few years. So maybe instead of telling newbies they're not allowed to jump cameras, we work on teaching them how to do it safely. That's how everything else in this sport has evolved. Remember "no square canopies with less than 200 jumps?

I think it is (sadly) unavoidable that focusing on the dive and ignoring the camera will move from common sense to BSRs to part of the FJC in the next few years. So maybe instead of telling newbies they're not allowed to jump cameras, we work on teaching them how to do it safely. That's how everything else in this sport has evolved. Remember "no square canopies with less than 200 jumps?