[pure-silver] Re: Biking and photography

Mark Blackwell wrote:
Well add me to the list of cyclist/photographers. I recently bought a mountain bike to make the most of my photography time in nature situations. 

[...]
There are a couple of ideas I have in mind. A trailer might be an alternative. I also have a seatpost mounted carrier that I could strap something to, but what seems to be the question. That has a limit of 20 lbs too which is a limit I had hoped to avoid. 

Some food for thought.  Never mind crashing, just the ordinary vibration
of riding can be hell on equipment; in last weekend's Solvang Century,
I rode a lot of miles on fairly rough pavement, enough that it vibrated
my LED headlamp apart while I was doing around 35MPH on a descent.  The
headlamp rotates and snaps into a housing pretty firmly, and yet the
vibration was enough to unsnap it.  Of course, this was on an
unsuspended road-bike, but even a fully-suspended mountain bike
can get a lot of shock on rough dirt roads (never mind anything
technical).

I do not know how practical a trailer is on anything but pavement;
I tend to suspect a trailer would be a liability, and could make
you crash on rough dirt roads.
Option 3 is to put it in a backpack, but for me that's not acceptable. Not only is it not that protected, if truism 1 occurs I might land on it and that wouldn't be good for either me or the equipment. 

At the same time, a backpack might be the best way to isolate equipment
from shock transmitted from the bike under normal circumstances.  You
might also consider a rack on the ready with a bungy-mounted, heavily-
padded case.  It's just no fun to have weight hanging on your back.
The only other option is insurance and not caring what happens to the equipment. The insurance might still be a good idea, but I never seem to come out on insurance claims. 

Well, you're going to hammer the equipment just carrying it on a bike.
A 4-oz digital camera for $130 was the right trade-off for me :-)
Still the extra mobility of the bike could give me the ability to get much more work done in a much shorter time, IF I can figure out how to make it work. Travel light I hear, but that puts limits on the work I can do. Id rather try to figure out how to keep weight from being much of a limitation on the photography. 

Heh.  I've rapidly progressed from wearing a backpack with stuff in
it to regarding anything that I don't need to wear, eat or repair my
bike as ballast :-)

Dana
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