CHOOSING THE RIGHT CAMERA

In my last post I hope I qualified what I am writing about. I consider this as a Blogumentary. My concepts and writings are what you will see when I finish a documentary film that I am working on for a dear friend of mine. I spent a lot of time this summer in, and around the Saint Louis Missouri metro, San Diego California on an Indian Reservation, or now days called, Casino. Filming, what it takes to put on a fund raiser by yourself and compete in the same fund raiser.

I watched a friend, become a businessman, a marketer, a graphic editor, a conventioneer, an accountant, and stressed all at the same time. I saw a complete change in personally, motivation, and just plain strength to get through all of the challenges he went through to just get to a point, where he was actually going to enter into the Hoka Hey Challenge and go through the process of traveling over 10,000+ miles in two weeks on the back of a Harley.

The above picture says it all. For the most part this is the prize possession, the patch on the back says it all. If you have one of these, pardon the phrase; "You've Got Balls."  I don't know how much more frank to put it. This patch is only going to worn by a few girls and guys across the country. If you see one on the back of a well oiled leather jacket, you need to bow in the owner's general direction. Most that enter this challenge never finish, they wreck, or in the hospital with exposure, or the worse... "They died trying."

I guess, the phrase many have tried, and many have failed comes to light hear. So I guess the journey starts here... The background on the video and pictures you will be seeing. All of the photos you will see are pulled off a high end 4-K. video camera, which I am not going to mention names, but Sony and GoPro Black were very good to David, Daniel, and myself.

I must mention my young lad Daniel who was out standing with the cameras, and back ground commentary that were used in the producing what your seeing. I handled all of the post editing , some camera work, color correction, framing and audio engineering, and special effects editing in all the up coming 8-weeks of posts. I will end this series with about a 30-40 minute video trailer, which is part of the final Doc that Dave is going to get for himself and family. "I felt like sharing..."

The video direction today at the end me mumbling, is an over view of the hunt for the right camera for the trip. I can't tell you how many conversations with GoPro went on about the 4k-Black. For the price it pretty much does what it says it's going to do. Finding professional hardware to mount it in 15 positions on a Harley with out damaging the bike was a bit of challenge.

Go Pro makes some ok hardware for it's cameras, but you have to be a grip to modify and know where to get Pro hardware that will take the beating that Dave was going give the camera on the journey. I strongly believe that Go Pro is missing the boat by not having a Pro division for it's cameras, but it targets enough consumers with a good quality consumer grade cameras, with some Pro tools included for the consumer, it makes up for the R&D in a Pro division I guess.

At some point I may do another four to six week blog on what are the best positions using a motor bike to mount Go Pro's on while riding and not worrying about the cameras becoming damaged. I should also mention, Dave had a remote devise that turned the camera's on and off. He also used the wireless phone app to remote focus the camera and set framing. This is all consumer grade equipment, but you need a tech or ten year old to help you get it installed the first time for the most part on your phone. "No flip phones!"


This project had a lot of bells and whistles that most consumers won't use. In addition Dave had a Go Pro first aide kit that had two of the exact same parts for the most part that we deemed possible failure during the trip. This was a must to save time on the journey.  Knock on wood, nothing broke on the trip, which is unheard of on a trip this extensive.

I don't want to take anything away from Go Pro but the consumer grade gadgets are strictly for consumers, no more no less. I chose a local Go Pro dealer at a commercial-retail photographic warehouse in Saint Louis called "Schiller's Photo." The staff was off the hook, over the top with the handling of all the gear. Of course when your in the thousands of dollars it helps out a little with customer service.

On the technology side, or the brains of the hardware, was a static drive computer made by Surface. I chose that computer, because of it being light and no moving parts in the hard drive with a spinning disk. It had a memory card external reader, and 8 terabyte external portable hard drive. The cards were high speed x10 times memory cards made by Lexar in the mini external USB format.

I found the cards super fast as long as the computer can keep up with the external card reader, which it did. The Lexar super cards also can be used with the Sony DSLR's we used in most of the body of the photo's, and video.

So that's what this video is about in this second installment. Look next week for part-three and four of my blogumentary, "In the wind 2016, Dave Peters racer #861.