200 jumps before jumping camera?

[quade 3]

In a thread in the General Skydiving Discussions forum the question was asked;

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>why there is a 200 jump minimum required (recommended) to jump >with a camera? . . . then what is the big deal?

billvon wrote an excellent responce from the point of view of one of those people that isn't really shooting camera as a "camera flyer", but simply "wearing" it as a way of documenting the event.

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Because it absolutely will affect how you fly. You will pay more attention to the camera than to the jump. Two examples of this in action:

1) At about the 2000 jump mark, I built a chestmount camera to use during AFF. A bit later I took it on a bigway at Perris. At this point I was a decent bigway flyer - had a few state records, had a reputation of being a reliable late diver etc. Well, on the first jump I collided with someone, and the second jump I ended up in the wrong sector. Kate told me to get rid of the camera (which I did.) Why was I having a problem? Was it getting in my way? Nope, it just stayed on my chest; I didn't even have to aim it. Was it making the dive more complex? Nope - I just turned it on before exit and turned it off after I landed. It was just that I knew I had a camera on, and was thinking not only about my job on the skydive but about what the camera was seeing (which all camera flyers do.)

I made a bunch more jumps on the system (probably another 100 or so) and then took it to another bigway event. This time I was OK; I could handle the multitasking better. Since then I've taken a similar system on three world records and gotten some good pictures.

2) At Brown we did a demo one day into a golf course. It could not have been an easier demo. Wide open landing areas, low winds, clear day. We took people with at least a C license.

It was a scary thing to watch. A helicopter on the ground - perhaps 1/4 mile from the LZ - waited until everyone was under canopy before starting up, and didn't take off until well after the last person landed. But one jumper saw the rotor start to spin up and freaked out. He landed hard enough to break both his femurs; amazingly he was OK. (The wet grass had something to do with it.) Someone else landed into the only tree in a 500 foot radius of the target.

Why did they have so many problems? Was the area tight? No. Were there immediate hazards they were dodging? No. It was just that they had more things to pay attention to. There was a helicopter that had its rotor spinning! Oh no! And there's a tree! What do I do? I should avoid that . . . WHAP.

It wasn't that these people didn't have the basic skill to land in a big area - it's that there were distractions that they didn't have the experience to manage yet. Camera is like that as well.

I'd wait until you have 200-300 jumps, until you can do RW without worrying about whether you will get there or not, without worrying whether you can break off safely, without ever losing sight of the people on the dive. Once you can do that, then add the camera and do very simple skydives until that is second nature as well.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver