Mad Times

Bike-cam

One of the hacks in O'Reilly's cool Digital Photography Hacks book made me want to get an UltraPod mini tripod, so when I saw an Eddie Bauer branded one at the outlet store in Lincoln City over the weekend I snagged it. As you can see, it very nicely straps to the stem on my mountain bike and allows me to do timelapse movies of bike rides like I've been wanting to do for a long time. (Yes, I am a big dork. Why do you ask?)

Today I tried it out and took this movie (38 second 6.2MB AVI video Beware of that link if you're on a dialup connection (this means you, Mom)) of my daily commute route. There's a little surprise about half-way through that should be amusing to my regular readers.

My camera (Pentax Optio S4) takes 1-minute video clips but it has a feature to spread that one minute out over 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, or 100 minutes of real time. This movie was shot in 20x mode. 10x wouldn't be long enough for my commute unless I rode a bit faster than I tend to, or took a more car-filled route.