SO YOU WANNA MAKE SOME RIDE VIDEOS

After seeing countless videos of other people out riding I began to wonder, "How hard would it be to make videos."  So I began to investigate a little bit and discovered it is really quite easy.  I saw a few of my friends with various cameras taped and bungee'd down to the tanks of their bikes, but that really was not what I had in mind. Sony has quite a few small Video cameras available and I was shopping for one of those when I saw the Samsung SC-X105L.
It is a tiny unit smaller than a box of Milk Dud's candy. It came with a remote lens a little bigger than a tube of lipstick. I spent about 20 minutes talking with a friend on my cell phone while reading him the features and then made the purchase.







Walking around shooting videos is much different than setting up a camera on a moving vehicle. There are things that you can not do while riding… Focusing and aiming are a couple that come to mind. It took a good deal of experimenting to find locations that would work well. I didn't want dead bugs to accumulate on my lens, but I also didn't want the glare of being behind the windshield either. I finally settled on a mount just inside the front mirror mount on my bike. I used a piece of aluminum and fabricated a mount that would allow me to easily reach the remote lens to turn it off and on, and yet still give the viewer a sense of what the view looks like to the rider. I also played around with various places to mount the main camera unit, so I could turn it off and on, as well as access the camera's menu functions. I made a cross bar that allows me to mount the camera and my Pocket PC, that has my Garmin GPS software.

Next