Key takeaways
- Photos and video come with the ticket here, which is not universal in this business.
- Shot from positions on the bridge and below it, covering the edge and the fall.
- Anything loose goes in a locker. There is nowhere safe to put it and a river below.
- The single piece of advice that improves the photograph, and the easiest one to forget.
What you get
Photographs and video of your jump, included in the ticket rather than sold afterwards. That is genuinely worth noting, because at a great many adventure operators the media is a separate and substantial add-on presented at the moment you are least able to say no.
Here it comes with the jump. It is ready at the visitor centre by the time you have climbed back up, and it is yours.
The practical consequence is that you can walk out onto that bridge with nothing in your hands and no decision left to make about recording it.
Where the cameras are
Fixed positions covering the platform and the drop, plus crew shooting at the edge. Between them they get the walk out, the countdown, the moment of leaving and the fall itself.
The angle everybody wants is the one from below, looking up as somebody comes down towards the river, and that is precisely the shot no phone in your pocket could ever produce.
The result is more usable than a helmet camera, which mostly records blurred sky, and considerably more usable than a friend on the bank.
There is one shot the fixed rig gets that is worth waiting for in the queue: the frame from below at the moment the cord goes taut, with the jumper stopped and the river directly behind them. Watching two or three people go before your turn tells you exactly where that camera is, which is the only preparation the photograph needs.
Why you cannot take your own
There is nowhere to put it. You are being inverted, decelerated hard and possibly dipped in a river, and anything not physically attached to you will end up in the Kawarau.
Phones, watches, jewellery and anything in a pocket go into a locker or to somebody in your group before you are harnessed. This is not negotiable and it is a rule written by experience.
People with action cameras and chest mounts should assume the answer is no and ask rather than turn up with a rig.
The view from below the bridge as a jumper comes down
What to do with your arms
Out. Wide. That is the whole technique and it is the difference between a photograph you keep and one you delete.
The instinct under adrenaline is to clutch: hands to the harness, arms in, shoulders up. It is entirely natural and it produces an image of a person in a foetal position falling off a bridge.
The crew will remind you at the edge, and the reminder is worth taking seriously because you will not remember it on your own.
The other thing worth doing, and almost nobody does, is looking at the camera at the edge rather than at the drop. The crew will tell you where it is. Two seconds of eye contact before you go produces the one photograph from the day that shows a person rather than a posture.
The swallow dive, and not attempting one
The classic bungy image is a full swan dive, arms out, body straight, falling head first. It looks superb and it is what the good photographs are of.
It also requires a deliberate forward launch rather than a step, and this is not the moment to be learning it. Most first-timers step or fall rather than dive and the pictures are perfectly good.
If you want the dive, say so at the edge and the crew will talk you through it in about ten seconds. Do not improvise.
Getting the files
At the centre afterwards, through the operator’s own system. Details are given on the day and it is a straightforward process.
Download them before you leave the country rather than trusting a link to still work in three months, which is the usual and entirely avoidable mistake.
Check them before you get on the transfer. If something has gone wrong with a shot, the moment to raise it is while you are still at the bridge.
It is worth naming the failure mode, because it is common enough to be predictable. People download the files to a phone with almost no storage left, at the end of a long day, on a visitor-centre connection, and assume it worked. Check the file actually opened rather than that a progress bar finished, and if you are travelling with somebody, send them a copy on the spot.
Whether it is worth having
More than most souvenir media, for a specific reason: you will not remember the fall clearly. Adrenaline interferes with the laying down of memory, and a great many jumpers describe watching their own video as genuinely informative.
The photographs also do something a memory cannot, which is show you your own face at the edge. That is frequently the image people keep rather than the falling one.
And it is included, so the only decision left is what to do with your arms.
A last practical point: check the video plays before you leave the building, not just that the file exists. Formats and phone players do not always agree, and the staff at the centre can solve in thirty seconds what becomes unsolvable once you are on the other side of the world.
