I decided to hit the road (Washington Rochambeau road to be precise) to get some practice with my Digital Story Telling project. The project is to tell the story of the Washington Rochambeau route with the motorcyclist point of view in mind. This is part of a larger project I am calling the “Hundred Holy Roads.” Today’s primary objective was doing a “lessons learned” experiment with video recording. Below are my findings.

First I tried to fit a standard tripod into various positions on the bike (between the break petal and handle bars.) That lasted one bump, then the camera rotated around and almost fell of the bike. So I reconfigured in the same location and tried to stabilize the device with my hand. The problem… controlling a motorcycle requires two hands. Solution: let my girl friend hold the camera while she rode on the back. Unfortunately this didn’t help either. She tried to hold the camera over my shoulder, but the wind rolling past me pushed her hands around and caused the video to be shakier than the previous configurations. I knew a mounting system was in order.

A quick trip to Wal*mart to find a mounting system ending led to a purchase of a moldable tripod. I wrapped the system around the handlebars with the camera on the top. After 30 seconds the camera had fell on its back and the video it did record was still quite shaky. I decided to hang the camera upside-down and rotate the video using my editing software. This too allowed the camera to shake, but not nearly as bad as before. When I could help hold the device the video would stabilize even more. This isn’t the end of my quest for a stable method to video but the effects were at least worth editing to provide a little proof of my attempts. My apologies for the still quite shaky video any tips would be much appreciated… as long as you don’t tell me to go by a GoPRO camera for hundreds of dollars.

Please check out the video HERE . The file was too large to upload to the blog.