Spring bike ride shot / bike camera mount

Here's one of a series of recent shots I made with a special rack to mount a 35mm SLR to my mountain bike.

To get this shot I made an extended baseplate that attaches to an existing standard bike rack. There are lots of ways to do this, this is just one of them. I used two pieces of 3/8" aluminum rod carefully bending these and bolting them to a piece of 3/16" thick flat aluminum. The aluminum plate has a hole in the center that allows bolting a heavy duty ball-head to this rack. I use a remote cord to make the shot while I'm riding. It's stiff vertically but I used a wide nylon strap to synch this up (from the seat stay crossbar to the ball head) to give it more support horizontally with this (heavy) Nikon F4s. Next time I'd probably make the main strut run horizontally. But this config works very well. I also counter weight it with a sand bag attached to the opposite side of the rack. Works great with video cams as well.


Mark

Nice shot! That's a good idea, but aren't you afraid of rocks hitting your lens!? Good stuff.

Welcome to PR.com Mark..
I want one of those!!
Please send one to the following address.... :rolleyes: :D :p ;)
Props to you for your creativity and inovation!
Brian
Ride On!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TEMPESTboy

Nice shot! That's a good idea, but aren't you afraid of rocks hitting your lens!? Good stuff.

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Thanks, my next project is a lens guard of some sort, maybe out of clear acrylic or a large filter glass.There wasn't very much loose dirt on this trail and I wasn't going as fast as I could for this to be a problem. But I did carry a can dust-off with me and had to **carefully** clean the lens afterwards. Ideally I would use a well worn lens for this (like the camera I used).

m

Build it yourself, Brian!

Mark told me it cost him about $150 in parts to build that rig. If he makes one good sale from a photo made with it, it was money well-spent. I've been wanting to build something like that for a long time. You can actually buy a lot of mounting stuff made for video, that will do the same thing. But it would probably cost hundreds instead of $150.

Thanks for posting all that, Mark. That's good stuff for this forum!

very very cool... low budget with high tech results... I have an awesome location for such a contraption... I may try to get something similar together... thanks for the post!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Photo-John

Build it yourself, Brian!

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I could build something like that...
Thanks for the email Mark!
Brian

Way Cool!! But I am not brave enough to put my camera in that kind of jeopardy!