First, a warning. This post gets pretty geeky. If you aren’t into cameras, or how images are made, you might just scroll to the bottom. You could also check out this link, to some cool images in my portfolio.

I’ve been looking for way to wirelessly fire my SLR remotely for some time now.  In this quest, I’ve tried a few different products intended for firing the shutter on my Canon SLR, with mixed results. None of them really worked that well. I found the first one in a camera store in Kelowna, BC. 

RFN3 Wireless Shutter Release

At $120, the shutter release seems a bit pricey, but when a single cord for a for a Pocket Wizard Wireless Transmitter is $80 or so, it appeared to be a less expensive solution to the problem. It seemed to fit the bill- I was able to fire my camera using a remote in my hand. The plan was to tape it to the handlebars on my bicycle in order to do self portraits while riding trails in the woods, for my site ihatebikes.net.

Things seemed to be good-  it fired the camera from an reasonable distance, and I was able to hang it on my grip easily with a hair bungee and some tape. That is, until halfway into a paid gig, when it abruptly stopped working. I ended up getting the shots I needed, but had to fiddle with it a bit until I got it working again.  However, using old school Nintendo tactics (ie, blowing on it) is a bit ridiculous. For what I paid, I wasn’t willing to be stuck with a random piece of plastic from Taiwan that may or not work a week from now, so on my way back through Canada, we made a detour and I returned it.

Cleon wireless shutter release

I foolishly tried again with a similar product, the Cleon, from Phottix. I believe I found it on Ebay, and with a price of $30 or so shipped from China, it looked like the same product with different packaging.

Unfortunately I had similar results. The product worked- at times. The wireless remote didn’t fire the camera half the time, and that led to a bit more hair pulling, although I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. The push button release would fire the camera consistently, and that is about all I could recommend using the product for.

At this point, I was tired of messing around, and after reading the Chase Jarvis post on POV photography, and seeing some of the possiblities a reliable remote trigger system had besides just using myself as a MTB model in a pinch, I ordered up the rather expensive (it is all relative I guess) PW pre-trigger cable.

Finally- a real solution.

Now the question was, how am I going to attach and position this thing so I can reach the button and fire the damn camera? Back to Google, and after some searching, I found it on Reuben Krabbe’s blog. In his DIY tutorial, he modifies a miniphone jack, and connects it to a push button switch.

Heading off to Radio Shack, I purchase the necessary supplies, and shelved the project temporarily, as I don’t own a soldering iron. However, my brother is a full blown RC fanatic, and he just happens to be a master of the solder, so on my last visit, I pulled the bag of parts out and sat down with him to complete the mod.

My brother Izaak, working his soldering magic.

My custom push button trigger for my Pocket Wizard

Little bro did a great job, and even added some seriously nice finishing touches. I was expecting to wrap the soldered connection with electric tape; what he did turned out super pro.

Plugging it in to my Pocket Wizard, the project seemed to be successful. Pushing the button activates the PW on the camera via channel one. In order for everything to sync correctly, the Pocket Wizards on the speedlites need to be set on the next channel.

Mounting the push button trigger

All that was left was to get out and test the new set up. Heading into the woods near our apartment, I set the camera up on my tripod. I bungied the Pocketwizard to my bars, and using gaffer’s tape, set the trigger up near my grip so I could actuate it while riding. The big test would be seeing if I could time the pushing of the button with aggressive moves while riding.

Testing out the new push button trigger, somewhere in the urban forest of Portland, OR.

It turns out I was able to manage hitting the button at the right time- although I did end up shooting each position I was trying to shoot 10 or 20 times before I started getting results I was happy with. The downside to this system is that I am going to need at least one more Pocketwizard, as one is mounted on the camera, one on the bar, and one with my speedlite. I had issues slaving the flashes, so I’m going to get another (preferable at least two more) to get the effects I’m after.

The final image

Here is the final image from the day. It was creating using a composite of five separate images in post processing. I have one flash that is mounted to the camera right that is pointing to the rider. In this case, it’s me. I ripped through this s-turn section on the bike over two dozen times. Each time I would tap the push button on my left hand at the appropriate point, and capture an image. At one point in the day, the sun popped through the trees and lit the trail, which was perfect. The final product took a considerable amount of time to shoot and put together in post, but in the end, I came through with what I think is a pretty sweet image that I can add to my portfolio.

What do you think?

The Bridgetown Hustle took place on Friday February 5th at the Nemo Design Studios in Portland. A convergence of bikes and associated culture, the event kicked off with an opening of a bike art show that featured installations, photography, prints and a few paintings and drawings. Backyard Blam held a cross genre bunny hop contest which pitted BMX versus MTB versus Freestyle fixed,(BMX won) and had a number of launch ramps, picnic tables, and other features for the riders to play on. Inside, they also held a packed Goldsprints race for the prize of a bicycle donated by Giant Bicycles.

The crowd was a broad range of cycling enthusiasts, which was more than apparent from the variety the types of bikes stacked outside and cabled up in the parking lot, though the tight girl wearing jean crowd had strong attendance, with hipsters everywhere. At one point in the evening, it got pretty tight, especially after the events outside shifted indoors.

I got wind of the event just weeks before it happened, but had a few paintings that were ready to show that I was able to submit. I brought my camera with me, and was able to test my new low-key sneaky camera bag set up that utilizes Domke inserts in my Timbuk2 messenger bag.

The event continued on Saturday, with more mayhem planned, but we were unable to attend.

Please contact me if you are interested in the use of any of the images.

After dropping my girlfriend off at the airport the other day, I stopped by my buddy Bryce’s house for breakfast. He’s a random dude, and I’m a spontaneous guy, and somehow this combination ended up with the two of us paddling in kayaks down the Columbia Slough in the rain. To date, I’d never actually paddled a kayak, (always wanted to try) but as a former Boyscout with my Canoeing merit badge, it wasn’t totally unfamiliar to me. The Slough is a good spot to paddle around for a first timer, and I was able to dial my paddling technique in pretty quickly, which allowed me to really look around and appreciate the experience.

I love the reflections in the water, reminds me of a watercolor painting.. Photo taken with my iPhone

For those unfamiliar with the Columbia Slough, it’s a narrow waterway about 19miles long. It twists and turns west through Gresham and Portland dumping into the Willamette River, about a mile from where it joins the Columbia. I’ve seen it, driving through town over the various bridges over it, but never really looked at it.

There are eight launch sites for boating along the slough. We set in near the airport.

Being the camera geek that I am, I rarely go anywhere without a camera of some sort. As I’m pretty focused on bikes, I don’t do a lot of water sports, so I have yet to pick up any type of waterproof camera encasement. Fortunately for me, Bryce had a waterproof iPhone sheath, which he graciously gave up for my use.

more reflections captured with my iPhone

It was an interesting experience, traveling under the bridges. Taking a slower place than the world directly overhead left us free to observe nature while only being a stones throw away from it all. The habitats in the watershed support a wide range of wildlife which one doesn’t always see due to the hustle and bustle of day to day existence. I think the most dramatic part of our trip was passing through a culvert that went under a highway. The tide was low enough that we were able to pass through, but it did require ducking for the duration.

Entrance to the culvert.

Inside the culvert

more of the culvert.

It not something one does everyday, and it ended being a nice way to spend the morning. The occasional showers of rain made us thankful for Goretex fabrics, and not only did I get my first time in the water with a kayak, but I got a nice workout as well. We paddled about 60 blocks or so one way before coming to a point where we would have been forced to portage, where we elected to paddle back and get some lunch.

On top of it all, it was a good way to test out and really experiment with my phone as a camera.

We drive by this wrecked car every time we shuttle our downhill bikes. One day I finally took a picture of it.

Apparently it has been there for years.  Local kids in the Astoria and Knappa areas frequently utilize logging roads for party spots. This is located at the top of a mountain, at the end of the road. My buddy Jeff, who grew up here, said his father used to party up here as a kid, and it was back there even then.

This article on Photofocus.com is a good one for photographers utilizing a website designed in Flash. It also touches up on a lot on how I feel about Flash based websites from a search marketing perspective. In his list of why Photographers should choose a blog over a Flash site, he touches on how search engine friendly blogs are. Yes, search engines love blogs, but the key thing he doesn’t mention is that from a search engine perspective, (for example Google’s bots) read Flash based websites as ONE page. That’s one single page of content. If you have a website for you business and you paid a bunch of money to have it developed in Flash, guess what? No one is going to find it. Unless they are looking really, really hard.

Since sites completely designed in Flash are often embedded into a single webpage, (often the index.html page) this means they register to search engines as ONE page. You’ve effectively built a website that comes up as one page result, and rendered your business almost completely invisible to search engines, other than that one page. I hope you didn’t have a lot of content on that Flash site.  As mentioned, blogs, even photoblogs, are filled with key word heavy content. Because of the way PHP based sites pull up content, all of your articles and writings get spidered. This is a very good thing.

I don’t blog that much on this site, but on my E-zine Ihatebikes, I regularly write articles on mountain biking that feature heavily into search engine results. In fact, 54.60% of the traffic from the site came from search engines alone last month. If it was Flash based, I can tell you I certainly wouldn’t be updating it with content that much either.

When I design a website for a client these days, my first recommendation is to go with a Wordpress based blog. Recent releases of Wordpress, combined with the multitude of plugins and ready made themes make it really simple to get something up and running, and choosing a premium theme such as Thesis can make customizing it even easier.

While I’ve worked on a number of different CMS (content management systems) Wordpress is not only my favorite to develop and publish content with, is also the easiest to teach people. Unlike building a static website, when I build you a Wordpress based site, I also include a FAQ and show you how to get rolling. Instead of paying me or a web admin every month to update if for you, you’re free to update and change content anytime you want or need to, and your site will do that much more for you.

And now, a really cool picture of my cat. On the moon.

Call me a cat lady, but I love this shot so much I’m going to have to reshoot it until I nail the focus on his cute little face. Unfortunately, Neo (kitty’s name) was getting tired of flying through the air, and the shoot had to be cut a bit short, due to an irritated model.

I took my girlfriend bowling for her birthday. (among other things) I had my camera bag in the car, and felt weird about leaving it out there, so I brought it in. Once I had it, of course I had to document a bit of our bowling experience. We were the only people in the place, which was interesting. The old lady at the counter wouldn’t stop looking at us. Guess my speedlight on the floor was really interesting to look at. Perhaps she hasn’t seen anyone take pictures while bowling.

Either way, these ended up my favorites of the group.

What’s the point of being on the coast if you don’t visit the ocean now and then?

This image does a good job of illustrating how I feel about riding in the cold and wet northwest winters. It has been raining for over a solid week. Whenever there is a break in the precipitation, we’ve been lucky enough to take advantage of it.

My girlfriend Inga assisted with the shutter on this shot. She assists me quite a bit in my mountain biking photography. While I have been having good luck with my remote shutter release, I still haven’t found a way to take a self portrait shot and pan without my voice activated camera stand. This was pretty close to the shot I wanted, a glimpse into our trail rides here in the winter. My Canon G10 really does a good job as a trail riding camera, but I might need to come back with some lights, since it’s dark in the woods this time of year.

I haven’t done that much video in the past, but it is so easy to cut and edit a piece together, I am sure I will do a lot more.

I shot the footage using a Canon Powershot G10 and a GoPro Hero Wide handlebar mounted helmet camera.

After a fun trail ride in Longview the other day, I pulled out the gear to get some shots of bike riding pal  Alex shredding this fun single slalom type trail.

Al’s yellow and red helmet combined with his custom painted bike really popped in the woodsy surroundings.

I was pretty happy on how these shots ended up. Especially since I only brought a tripod, so the second flash ended up being positioned on a stump. (camera right in the above photo) I enjoy shooting photos on the trails as well, but my Canon G10 point and shoot has a hard time in the dark sections of forest here in the northwest. Maybe its time to start lugging the SLR around with me everywhere again.