Gear: i-Kam Xtreme

Sunglasses or video camera? Yes & yes.

I've only taken one trip since the arrival of my Hunter Specialties I-kam Xtreme sunglasses, and I'm already thrilled with the results. The little hole in the middle, right between the glasses' lenses, contains the video camera lens, so these glasses pick up everything you're looking at as long as they are running.

Click below and see for yourself. Nathaniel shot this video of an Arkansas trout battle just by fishing with the "glasses on." The shot at the end of me taking a photo of him is with the glasses on a rock, pointed at us, while we were unhooking the fish, getting photos and letting it go. So the whole thing is documented, from cast to release. Very cool stuff. We also got footage running in a boat, casting for bass, floating in a canoe...

With a micro SD card inserted, the I-kam Xtreme holds about three hours of footage, so you can run the camera pretty liberally if you think something cool might happen. You also can change out the lenses to clear lenses -- I suppose mostly for indoor shooting -- but I don't see doing that very often. They actually served nicely as sunglasses, camera function aside.

You can bet I'll have the card cleared and be ready to do more filming next week when I leave for western Pennsylvania to fish three different lakes in three days! More i-Kam Xtreme videos to follow for sure!

Cameras, Cameras, Cameras

If Nathaniel and I fail to deliver images or video clips when the fish start biting, it's surely not due to a lack of cameras. The camera arsenal includes a new waterproof Pentax that allows us each to have one handy when we're wading or floating and really cool pair of i-KAM XTREME sunglasses, which have a built in video camera right in the center.

The cameras (not all of which are pictured) almost seem like overkill, but they really do all have different jobs. The Canon SLRs still get the most work, but the weatherproof cameras stay ever handy and help me get way more photos in streams. The GoPro gets video from Nathaniel's head and is also cool for extreme wide angle, water-level shots. Our phones allow for immediate posting on blogs, Facebook and Twitter, and the glasses can film everything that goes on and are apt to get us some really cool footage of things like topwater strikes.

The big challenge, of course, is bringing and keeping up with all the corresponding power cords and memory cards and getting cameras recharged and images downloaded at night. However, I'll take the challenges for the opportunities these cameras will provide.