Zipshot. Love mine for a G12 and have even used it with the GoPro.

Take it, you will wish you had it the entire time if you don't.

Landscape... and unfortunately, night photography. However, so long as the camera is sitting on something stable like a rock, I can use my remote to take a great long-exposure shot. I'm going to heed your advice and leave it behind this trip, the camera is a luxury on its own.

Everything I can do with my remote shutter releases can be done with the internal timer and menus on the D7000. With the exception of if you want to climb some rock that takes 15 minutes and then take a shot, but even that can be accomplished with the interval meter if you don't mind ditching the other shots where you were climbing the rock.

For landscapes, I really only "need" my tripod for low speed water shots, lightning. There is no other way to get those except to have the appropriate tripod. The odds of finding a rock with the correct angle is slim.

For night shots what were you thinking? Stars in the sky?

You are correct, but if you go to a photography forum and ask how many people have photographed the moon it is amazing how many of us have. Just because someone else has captured the image, doesn't make it any less special the first time a photographer is able to get it him/her self.

Ok, a couple things,

#1 , you can always find a rock at the right angle... I have 40 objects of different sizes and shapes with me in my bike bags. I can easily set up a platform for the camera to point a certain way. I might miss the occasional shot because I can't get the camera high enough (making a tripod worth it) but, overall, I'm not going to struggle to take the occasional long-exposure shot.

#2 . Timers can be frustrating. If I press the shutter and mess up the "stand" for the camera, then I've botched the shot. A remote weighs an ounce.

#3 . Saying that everything I've seen, a better photographer has already seen it or rejected it; I've never heard something so fundamentally incorrect. The composition, lighting, cloud formations, vegetation, human beings, etc. are infinite in variation. So infinite, it cannot be comprehended. Beautiful and breathtaking shots have yet to be discovered and will continue to exist for centuries, no matter where you go. People take pictures of the Eiffel Tower and win photo competitions even today, because an artist can always find a new interpretation.

I'm there to photograph. I also photograph to be there. I like to ride, of course, but riding is not an end in itself. Sometimes the bike is just a mode of transportation.

EDIT: if you're there for the ride and "cover grounds", remember that there's always someone who's done it faster than you.

how did we survive before image stabilization?
I have been on a couple 1000 km trips with a point and shoot.
It had a 20 x optical lens. my hand held shots were good enough for me.
But I'm not submitting them for publication.

is the purpose of the trip photography, or bicycle touring?
If it is photography, take a tripod. If it is cycling, leave the tripod at home.

I'm sorry, I have to call you out here. When I carry my camera, and I point it at something, I'm trying to get the best possible shot. I am, in a sense, an artist.

I can't afford a million lenses and three tripods and four cameras. That doesn't matter. I get amazing shots sometimes, and mostly I get utter ****, but I strive for amazing shots.

Award-winning National Geographic photographer Tomas van Houtryve carries two cameras, and one of them doesn't even shoot in color. Each has a single fixed lens on it, usually 35mm, and neither are a DSLR (although one's a very nice rangefinder). Why doesn't he carry 10 lenses and two tripods and two pro-bodies? Because it's not about the camera. It's about the photographer. (Source: http://proof.nationalgeographic.com/...mpaign=Content)

The point of this thread was to try and find the least amount of stuff I need to be on tour "to do photography," as you put it. That's what I'm doing when I raise my camera. When the photography gear impedes on the experience, lessens it overall, I have too much gear.

The experience SHOULD impact my shots, even at the cost of taking mediocre pictures that have a big impact on me personally. That's the point of art, isn't it? I'm trying to capture moments that transgress the temporal and physical boundary and convey what I was feeling when I raised the camera. Every once in a blue moon, I do.

What am I there to do? I'm there to have a bike tour. Getting advice from others helps me figure out how to balance my gear, my experience, what I carry, and what I don't. Thanks to everyone- this thread did that! But the drift into whether or not I can be a photographer without X, Y, and Z gear is unsettling.

The attitude that I either have to be there to shoot the best pictures that have ever been taken in that spot, or I have to be there to ride faster than anyone's ever ridden before, is really ridiculous. You guys are living unfulfilling lives if you think that your experience is invalidated if it resembles someone else's.

When I ride as fast as I can, as far as I can, and break my P.R's and achieve an awesome physical feat for myself, I feel amazing. It's a natural high.

When I am careful and I compose a shot in my mind and I sit and wait an hour for the sun to set a bit farther just so I can get that composition that I was looking for, and I get it, and it looks amazing, I'm the happiest I can be.

Can't really even comprehend why you think that's a waste of my time just because Ansel Adams took a nicer picture and Tommy Godwin rode farther.

Makes me laugh when you put the "even" in there as though that is a dismissive thing (although I know you are trying to emphasise a point). Shooting B&W requires a lot of skill and knowledge to get right, and many classic pictures are in that medium, especially portraits.

Machka takes a swag of pictures, in the many tens of thousands a year. They are a record of what we have done together over the years and help reinforce the memories we carry (or just awake the memories). The is a LOT more to taking unique pictures, and much of it is time and gathering knowledge. It's why the best photographers are paid squillions.

But you know that already.

I don't just know it, I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said. Just trying to dispel the myth that $15k in lenses is the only way to be serious about photography.

I'm glad you caught the "even." It's intentional. Sometimes, less is more; when the camera gear ceases to get "in the way" of the moment, truly great photography is born. All of WWII was recorded with portable handhelds and fixed lenses; a soldier can't carry ten pounds of glass.

I took these without a tripod, and most weren't even with a decent DSLR. But, it was decent enough, and afforded me the freedom I needed to travel light and not miss shots that still take my breath away (and imparted some of the beauty of bike touring to friends, family, and strangers).

I'm allowed to be serious about photography and mileage at the same time. Does it look like I'm compromising?

I am a professional photographer, for my tour next year along the Wisconsin coastline I will bring the following: one d7k without my grip, my 50 14, and my 18-105. My tripod is a heavy PITA so I will leave it at home. That said, I am very comfortable handholding on some very low light, along with having a 1.4 lens. For selfies I often just find a stranger and ask them to be my carbon based voice activated tripod.

One of my favorite night landscape shots was a four-minute exposure lit solely via moonlight, except for a tiny amber light from a rockclimber's sleeping platform high above the valley floor. :thumb:

That, and moonbows. :)

Yes, you are, but then again, life is a compromise.

I could go to the extremes. No camera, lighten up the bike, ride hard from day light to dark, pound out the miles OR bring the camera store with me, only want to make 5 miles today. There is only so much time in a day. I can only be bicycling or taking shots, I can not be pounding out the distance and spend an hour or two videoing a waterfall or stop every 15 minutes to photo the trail or ...

This being said, I think for my happiness, I need to be some place in the middle. A trivial 30 miles a day with camping gear and camera+tripod was good. OR 60+ with camera+tripod and hotel.

Or maybe I should put it a different way. On the GAP, I met some people. We would end up in the same hotel the next night. I left earlier in the morning and I arrived later in the evening. I leap frogged them several times in the day. Every time I stopped to take photos, they passed me. Then I would race past them as I rode faster (and they took a real lunch). But at the end of the day, they still made it to the hotel before I did. The compromise I made was stopping to take photos on this trip. The compromise they were making is stopping for lunch and not being able to ride farther or faster.

Life is a compromise.

And life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you will get.

I never get to stop any place cool where I can get that shot. It is the problem of living east of the Miss.

This being said, I have been tempted to do a winter trip after a snow. I know where I can get the Norman Rockwell photo.

Great thread! Thanks.

I use the clamp with ballhead, and the bicycle can be the tripod. I can also supplement with an ultralight tripod, but generally prefer the clamp and ballhead system. If I need tripod stability, I clamp to a signpost or such, or, to shoot at ground level, a bag of beans or such.

IMO- A tripod is not as essential as it was in "film days". When shooting with film, I'd often blow a whole roll of 36 on one subject just to ensure that I had a decent shot. I used a tripod a lot for landscapes and closeup work to ensure sharpness. It was like Christmas when I got the slides back from the lab or opened the developing tank when processing B&W film. I knew there might be a great present in there, but was not entirely sure what it would look like. With digital the results can be checked immediately, and reshot if the results are unsatifactory. Lanscapes usually hold still long enough for several shots.

On a 3-month tour we did some "on the back of an envelope" calculating to estimate how much time we spent taking pictures. Using an average of 1 minute per picture, which is very conservative, we came up with 75 hours. That is a pretty good chunk of time and equates to about 1050 miles at 14mph that we could have ridden if we chose to use the time differently. Photography has been our life-long passion, so we consider it time well spent. We also tend to concentrate on people pictures while touring, which does not lend itself to using a tripod.


Used a bridge railing for this. Sure, a tripod would have allowed me to get it "snappy" sharp, but I'm not sure that was necessary to convey place and mood. This was taken with a Canon G12, my present touring camera. I only stuck this in here becasue the Eiffel Tower was used as an example:)
http://i783.photobucket.com/albums/y...959ab4f886.jpg

We still use a tripod with our DSLR's, but that is when we have a need for extreme sharpness, or doing close up work.

Forget about low light, camera shake, self portraiture and the like - there is one very good reason for carrying a tripod and that is HDR photography. Much touring photography is about recording the vistas the tourist passes through, and HDR photography produces stunning landscapes. HDR photography requires up to 5 images and a tripod really is the best way to ensure they overlay accurately.

Look at some of these landscapes.

We went to an exhibition last night that was an essay for the Tall Ships festival that was held in Hobart just before we arrived back in the state. There were two shots that really grabbed me, and two that almost made the grade.

It's personal taste, I know, but if you are going to try for a neat light effect on a docked at night, do it at 2 or 3am in the morning when the place is deserted, not when there are a tens of people about creating ghosts that distract from the main subject. The two that missed in my estimation were like that.

I'll just also go back to my comment earlier about photographs being a record. I am applying for a tour guiding job at the moment, and one of the things I have done is sent the company a link to Machka's flickr account, essentially to validate my claims about travel. As it transpires, the principal of the business has a done a lot of bicycle touring herself. But a part of the job requires getting involved with the participants -- hiking, swimming and so on. I can show I have scope to do all those things, too.

So don't forget to include pictures of yourself doing stuff. It's then that a tripod can really come in handy, especially if you want to set up shots of you actually riding your bike.

Very cool. I don't think most of us will be tour guides.

Stunningly fake, I'd say. Most HDR-enhanced photos that I've seen just scream "I USED HDR!!!" to me. This is one of those tools that most people don't seem to be able to use with any subtlety...

I remember talking to a grade school art teacher many years ago....

Do you know the difference between 1st grade art and 5th grade art?
The 5th graders know when to stop.

HDR is an incredible tool, but too many people don't know when to stop.

The "problem" is that many can't resist the urge to go nuts on the tone mapping and turn the scene into some ethereal otherworldly image. Done with restraint, it can bring out highlights in one section of a image that might otherwise have blown out detail.

And it's nothing new. Ansel Adams was a master at the analog version of tone mapping, known as dodging and burning, which was done when making prints from a negative. He also wrote the definitive book on the subject, albeit primarily for b/w prints: The Print (Ansel Adams) | Amazon.com

To a degree, much of this can be accomplished in the camera itself with a graduated neutral density filter, which lets you expose the sky differently than the ground, but assumes a flat horizon and doesn't lend itself particularly well to rugged mountain landscapes or skylines (for example).

Here's a picture from Wikipedia's HDR page that IMO shows an example of lost contrast and detail in three individual exposures (along the bottom) restored via HDR without going too terribly far overboard (click image for full sized picture):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...gentina%29.jpg

And, yes, you need a tripod, and probably a camera with a built-in exposure bracketing function.

FWIW, my other use for a good, solid tripod and ballhead would be panoramas. Obviously, YMMV.

Me too.

The top image has clearly been altered using HDR. Not as bad as some, but it looks decidedly unnatural to my eyes... The middle photo on the bottom row looks much more natural to me.

To my eye it is a quite pleasing image, but I do think it is a bit overdone. I suspect the exposure bracketing is a little broad. But there are plenty of photoshopped images out there that are equally overdone.