Image of the Week: Mountain Biking I, Middlebury, Vermont

What do you do when you can't plunk down a tripod before your subject to get the shot? Use a little magic.

A Bogen/Manfrotto Magic Arm, that is. The Magic Arm is an articulated support that attaches to a number of photo accessories. Using a Super Clamp on one end and a camera platform on the other, one can mount a camera in the most unlikely places, such as the handlebars of a bike.

The Magic Arm is fairly sturdy, but even it was tested after I mounted a Nikon D200, flash, and a bouncer to it. After only a couple-hundred feet down a gravel road, the arm had vibrated itself almost to the ground. A bungie cable helped to absorb a lot of that shock and kept the arm from bottoming out, but you have to be careful or you'll end up with a camera covered in road rash.

To trigger the camera, I set the D200's built-in Interval Timer function to fire a frame every 2 seconds. With the bright, overcast sky filtering through the forest canopy, I used the SB600 Speedlight to fill in the shadows on my face and chest, adding a little punch to the exposure. To soften the flash a bit, and to elevate the source to mitigate that direct on-camera flash look, I added a Lumiquest ProMax Ultrasoft diffuser.

Have questions, comments? Let me know what you think.

Technical Data

Mountain Biking I, Middlebury, Vermont was captured with a Nikon D200 fitted with a Nikkor 10.5mm ƒ/2.8 fisheye lens. Fill light was provided by a shoe-mounted Nikon SB600 Speedlight with Lumiquest Soft Bounce modifier. The exposure was 1/4 sec at ƒ/11.

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