Lot's of Playing with Video - More Joy to My Commuting

I continue to play around with experimental camera shots - the above is an example of my hand-held while riding adventures. The sense of speed is higher than my actual speed, but I like these shots, I mean, you can only take so many of the same Portland buildings and bridges, especially when the light and weather are basically the same day in and day out.

Here's one on the Radac. I like the coloring on this as I forgot to reset the white balance and the image was originally shot for tungsten light, so the original was very blue. De-bluing created a different image than if I had shot with an outdoor white balance mode.

Maybe you noticed an odd, wired thingy attached to the Radac's stem? It's my latest toy, a bullet type point of view (POV) video camera - woohoo! A bit more on that later, though (feel the tension).

At work we have a VP who is occasionally biking into work, and so she has expressed full support for any recommendations on improving our bike storage woes. Not bad. I have a meeting with her in a bit over a week - VPs are so hard to get a meeting time. In the interim, I do track issues and have become somewhat of the org's bike advocate. So, I arranged to meet with John from OHSU (Oregon Health Sciences University) from their Transportation Options group. OHSU has done some cool work in new building incorporating bike storage, both for staff and for their clients.

Above is their free bike valet parking with approaching 200 bikes! There are staff (riding up the tram from here near the Willamette River up into the west hills where the main campus is) and client bikes. For after hours, the bikes are brought into the parking garage to one of the many bike storage cages which are key card access only.

Here's one area of lock-it-yourself near the tram. I am so impressed with the number of people biking to work and to their appointments. These racks are basically staple racks with a secret - there are 5 staples welded to heavy steel flat bar. These are not attached to the ground which allows for flexibility in placement on an on-going basis. Pretty cool idea. Again, I was in awe of how many bikes were all over, including I had to lock my bike to a sidewalk post and cable fence. Bikes were locked to benches, every where and anything. Truly supports the notion, if you build it, they will come.

In their garage (part of the local services building) there are several cages, which all have vertical racks. These were not full, but all had bikes in them. I have some great ideas to bring back to my work and see how we can maximize the spaces we have to accommodate bike commuters.

So, about the new video toy. I have played around with both bike mount and helmet mount configurations. I like the bike mount for image predictability and I like the helmet mount for flexibility.

My Vimeo - Shadow Video

I have a couple of other videos there, as well, enjoy.