I wanted to play around with some low angle perspectives, or point of view, whilst riding my bike on the back roads of Møn, Sydsjælland.
So, taking some cues from Chase Jarvis here I clamped a Manfrotto Super Clamp to my METAL bike and attached my D800 with a Nikkor 16-35 wide angle zoom on the other end. To fire the camera I used two Pocket Wizards one connected to the camera the other taped to my handlebars. Around 35,000 kr worth of camera gear, way more than my bike was worth!
At this point it was time to ride this rig and surprisingly after a few slow speed wobbles pushing off it was pretty stable even with the camera gear hanging off it!
I choose a quiet stretch of road I knew well and liked. The avenue of trees and the gently undulating road would give me some nice variations within a couple of hundred metres of road. Firing off a few test frames revealed that it would be tricky to find the correct shutter speed and focus point to get some background blur but still keeping the bike sharp. It is essentially a tracking shot, with the camera obviously moving at the same speed as the bike. But my set up theory worked.
After a few modifications to the camera settings, Nikon AF Mode “Auto” worked well, some were pre-focussed in manual focus mode the shutter speed was varied between 1/20th and 1/125th.
It was a “spray and pray” shoot in the end with variable shutter speeds,focus points,shooting blind, vertical/horizontal options and upside down camera over 40GB’s of memory cards filled up very quickly.
After a couple of hours of shooting and lots of in-camera culling of blurred rubbish, it was time to return to base and see on the big screen whether or not I had any “keepers”.
It is a “selfie” and if I was a real cyclist I would have shaved my legs…..The next shoot is try and persuade my cycling buddies to ride ahead of me with the same set up!
I learned a lot!
