My big mistakes: filming vertically

August 2022, first post-COVID-19 cruise, destination: the Central Atolls in the Maldives. Enthusiasm was sky-high and a great desire to film. I decided to experiment: I mounted the GoPro HERO10 on the pole, rotated 90 degrees to get vertical footage ready for Reels.

The result? A disaster, for two reasons:
Impossible Framing and Zero Margin for Error
The underwater world moves mainly horizontally (fish, sharks, mantas). Keeping these subjects in a tight, vertical frame is extremely difficult! Often the subject was not well centered. But the serious problem is the lack of margin for error in editing: no chance to recover a laterally misframed shot. Many clips became unusable, even for Reels, with the subject irretrievably out of frame.

Incompatibility with Horizontal Platforms
Second frustrating problem: almost all the material is unusable for standard platforms like YouTube or websites, which require horizontal format. Inserting a 9:16 video into a 16:9 project forces exaggerated zooms, losing important parts above and below.

Adding insult to injury: that August in the Maldives, the weather was bad. The only decent week was ours, but the previous rough seas made the water green and with reduced visibility, making it harder to get beautiful images, and the vertical format error was the final blow.

Lesson Learned: I have since always avoided the vertical format.
For your footage, always use horizontal formats: the classic 16:9 (for YouTube), or 4:3, or better yet 8:7 for more room to maneuver and versatility in editing.

The video shows a beautiful specimen of a Great Hammerhead (Sphyrna mokarran) filmed at Shark Tank, Hulhumalé, North Malé.